 Our guest this weekend is Pair Bieland, a professor of economics at Oklahoma State University, where he runs their entrepreneurship center. He's also a great friend of the Mises Institute and a longtime affiliated scholar of ours. With everything going on in Europe and the refugee crisis, we decided to tackle the thorny issue from a libertarian perspective of immigration. Pair wrote a seminal foundational article way back in 2005 that really lays out the case for examining immigration as a property rights issue, not an open borders issue, which is inherently statist in nature. So we're going to discuss the open borders libertarian position, some of the Hopian counter arguments to this, especially in the context of modern current welfare states. We're also going to talk about the effects of immigration on culture. As Pair is a Swede who has seen mass immigration change the face and facade of his own home country. If you're interested in immigration and culture and the unfolding crisis in Europe, stay tuned for a great interview with Pair Bieland. Well, Pair Bieland, thanks so much for joining us and welcome to Mises Weekends. Thank you. Great to be with you. Well, our topic today is immigration and of course this has been very much in the news with the refugee crisis in Europe. You wrote an article back in 2005 that we ran earlier this week at Mises.org called Refugees and Migrants in a World of Government Meddling. I thought this article was fantastic. So I want to use it as a starting point. You know, a lot of libertarians argue that open borders, as the term is used, is the only libertarian position. And as you point out in this article, that's a bit of a strawman, isn't it? No anarcho-capitalists are arguing for a state. So obviously we're not arguing for borders, but you make the point that open borders is an irrelevant argument because the real regulator of human migration ought to be property rights. Exactly. And I think actually minor kids would say the same thing, even though they're for a government, I don't think they want to protect the national territory from people entering voluntarily and who are welcome. They don't want to regulate that. That's not part of their inner and outer defense. But obviously what they sort of defense that you need in a free society is defense of your own property. That's the only kind of defense that there is. When we look at what's happening in Europe, this may be a manufactured refugee crisis in the sense that these may not be really truly refugees in the way we've used that term historically. But nonetheless, hypothetically, how should a libertarian society respond if boatloads of impoverished people in very desperate straits show up on their shores? Property rights does not imply that we machine gun these people, right? So do you think a libertarian society would have a particular response? I don't think a libertarian society would have any response to anything, really, because the society doesn't respond. Individuals respond. So what you would see is some property owners accepting people and being very charitable and generous. And if they want to have tents or whatever on their properties, then that's fine. And they have to deal with diplomacy really with neighbors. Some neighbors will not want anyone on their property. And that's their response. It's not really a libertarian society response. And that's part of the problem now, I think, that everything is really, it's a crisis with people migrating from one area to the other, not because they necessarily want to voluntarily, but because they're forced to, and their governments at both ends. No wonder these people are screwed. Well, let's walk through some of the open borders arguments that libertarians make quickly. One argument I've heard several times is that just because we have a welfare state and that provides an inducement for migrants, we shouldn't compound that error by having another status policy, i.e., a border that is controlled. Right. And there's truth to that. Right? I mean, it's really two issues and two parts of government. One is government handouts, which we're talking about the welfare state. And the other is government artificially putting up borders or restrictions saying that some people are entitled to the handouts that we give out, which are really still in property. Some people are not. I've also heard argued by Donald Boudreau, who's a professor at George Mason, that while we do have a welfare state and we do have a government, at least for the foreseeable future, it's a very bad idea for libertarians to say that that government ought to mimic property owners and use government force to protect private property rights. This could lead to a huge growth or expansion of the state apparatus. Yeah. I mean, every libertarian argument, I think, has a point and every libertarian argument doesn't cover all the points, all the bases. And I think a problem here is that the protection of property rights is not that obvious what it is. Protection of property rights as in your home, whatever you have legitimate claim to. Yes. Who is property rights to what the government has and hands out? What is that? Who has it just claim to what the government has at present? I mean, who is the owner of this percentage of property that is forfeited through printing money, for instance? You can't even trace that. It's impossible. So the question is, is it really property or is it just for grabs? It's sort of the argument that we have between Walter Block and Bumperfee, right? I mean, can you as a professor work for a public university or not? Walter would claim that, yeah, you can. You should take as much as possible from the government because the government is illegitimate and everything is stolen property. You should take back as much as you can. Whereas Bob Murphy would argue that, no, you don't want any part of it. Immigration is sort of the same thing, right? Yeah, it is. And there's so many layers of the onion over so many decades of government meddling to peel. Let's address some of the Hoppean arguments. Now, Hoppe has been attacked as someone who's for borders or state force. When it comes to immigration, I think this is not true. I think this is a straw man argument. But nonetheless, let's go through some of these. One argument that Hoppe makes is that there's a difference between migration of goods, free trade, and humans because goods by definition have been invited. There's a customer or a consumer for those goods, whereas human migration can just be an immigrant making a decision all on their own to enter another country without any invitation. Yeah, I suppose there is some truth to that, too. The problem is not private property, again, it's public property. And the question then is, is there ownership of this public property or is there not? And that's really the core of it, because when you enter a country, usually you do not enter anyone's private property. If you do, if there is like a private say airport or a private terrain station or something like that, then it's not really an issue. As long as you're allowed to be there, it's not a problem from the Hoppean perspective or shouldn't be. The problem is if you're using the roads or if you're staying in a public park and things like that. And then I think it's a stretch to say that, well, the people who live in this country are taxed and this taxes are used to finance this public park. So the people of the United States of America, they have a rightful claim to this park. People in other countries do not. I think that is a big stretch simply because what you're looking at is really the consequences of actions. You're saying that, well, we are oppressed because we pay taxes. Well, we're also blessed because we get all of these other things that the government is just redistributing. So who is really a net tax consumer or who is contributing on a net? And does that really matter? Because when we're talking about a specific property, we're not talking about parks as a concept. We're talking about this one park. Who has really contributed to this park? Who has really benefited the most from this park? So would you say that someone who pays a little bit in taxes lives nearby and enjoys the view a little now and then? That compared to a rich guy who's paying a lot of taxes and he's using the park for jogging every morning. How do you compare these? What are their just claims to this particular park? And does this mean that one or the other has more rights to exclude someone who doesn't pay taxes that go exactly to this park? No. And then we're into the discussion of who is a citizen and who is not because no one would say that a child who doesn't pay taxes, that the child cannot use public park. Right. Well, I think the difficulty of all this is actually a good argument for smaller government or eliminating government altogether because we're not seeking utopia, we're seeking something better, right? We're seeking better solutions to these problems. And along that line, Hapa argues that, well, since we do have government at the moment, since we do have a welfare state at the moment, what should the role of government be and what should libertarians say government ought to do about immigration? His answer is, well, in the interim, government ought to act as a trustee and it should sort of mimic what a private property owner would do and protect property rights. And from some Hapa's perspective, that would mean in some cases limiting migration. Well, yes, absolutely. But then again, we're using the argument for individual private property, for public property. So we're taking the step from the individual who has rights, we can agree on that, to sort of the collective and what's collective. And that's where the children come in, right? That's where immigrants like myself, I pay taxes, should I get thrown out? Or next time I try to enter the country, which is a hard thing to do every time. It doesn't matter what documents you have, people are really nasty. Should I get stopped at the border? Well, as a student, I paid higher tax rates than Americans in the same situation. And I got a lower salary as well. And I had no rights whatsoever to any government benefits, so-called. So the problem is that adding government to the equation doesn't mean you're adding a variable. It means you're completely screwing up all the variables that are already there. And that's sort of the problem with this whole discussion, that it is not as simple as removing it and acting as if, or something like that. Because everything is just messed up. Well, and in defense of HAPA, one point you make in your article is that forced exclusion is bad, but so is forced integration, right? Telling a landowner that they can't invite someone, let's say, from Mexico into the U.S. is bad, but so is forcing another landowner who may not care to have someone from Mexico joining him or her is also a problem. So I think you make that point very well that there's an element of trespass when you view immigration and migration from a property rights perspective. Well, absolutely. And you have the reverse, too, right? You have property owners in the U.S. who would welcome, I don't know what, Mexican workers or whatever it is. Yeah, like Tyson Farms Chicken, for example. For instance. And the problem is that they cannot accept these migrant workers because the government says no. Well, then the government is really oppressing Tyson in this case and the Mexican workers. So it's it's also wrong to assume that the U.S. government oppresses only U.S. citizens. I mean, even if we exclude the wars, it's not the case because the border. What is it called? The walls around the U.S. They keep people in and they keep people out. They work both ways. Right. That's scary to consider shifting gear slightly here. I never seem to hear economists or libertarians talk about immigration externalities. In other words, we often hear left libertarians attack corporations for polluting, you know, pollution is a form of externality, a cost that's that's borne by everyone, whereas the benefits are enjoyed by the corporation only. Can we apply externality concept, the externality concept in economics to immigration? I think we can. I mean, any sort of regulation has a lot of ripple effects in general. So the example with the migrant workers from what is today called another country with another government, the U.S. government by restricting entry to the country is really keeping people or outside of the country and keeping people poor inside of the country as well. I mean, that's the same as pollution. Right. How do you solve it? To me, there is only one solution and that's to get rid of all of it. Let's talk about the idea of trust. The right wing in the U.S. in Europe is as long talked about having a high trust society where people have certain cultural, economic, religious, ethnic similarities. Francis Fukuyama, not someone I admire, but nonetheless, he was he was talking about high trust societies way back in the 90s. The left identifies this as well. If you look at the work of people like Mr. Mr. Putnam, who wrote the book Bowling Alone. Do you pair think there's anything wrong with this natural human desire to live among people who are culturally similar? No, not at all. I mean, of course, of course, people want to live with people that they understand to begin with and that they respect and that that work in and behave in ways that you you have a clue what they're what the heck they're doing, basically. And I mean, that's you see this all the time in with people just going to another country as a tourist. They tend to go to places where they feel comfortable, places where people speak their language, if possible. It's not possible if you're Swedish, of course, but if you're American, you can go to other countries where they speak English or go to parts of countries where they speak English. Americans are well known for going to foreign countries and eat at McDonald's. I mean, it's it's it makes sense. You hang with the people that you like and respect and and people who think of the way you do. I don't see anything wrong with that. I mean, that can be clashes between groups, but only if they're forced to live together. Voluntary segregation is personal voluntary and it's natural. That's what we do. Many libertarians are constantly telling us that having mass numbers of Islamic immigrants come into Europe is a healthy and good thing. Is it OK for you as a libertarian in a swede to care about having the cultural makeup of Sweden changed radically? Well, of course, it is OK to care about that. But the question is, what do you do about it? And I think it's it's wrong to adopt some sort of nationalist viewpoint and thinking of the nation state as something that I'm from. I have very little in common with a lot of people in Sweden, part of the reason why I left. But other people are in are coming to Sweden and that's fine. I don't see a problem with that at all. The problem could be the sort of clashes that happen after they come and they sit together and they're segregated. But that's that's also a problem because of the integration policies of the government in Sweden. It's which government is notorious for accepting immigrants and refugees, putting them in paid apartments, giving them a check every month and saying, stay there, we're investigating. And then it takes five to ten years or something like that before before there they learn that now you need to go back or maybe yeah, you can stay. But if you're someone from a country where you're used to taking care of yourself and your family and you're basically locked up in an apartment in a suburb somewhere, which is not as nice as it is in the US over there. Then your spirit, your any sort of entrepreneurial spirit that you had before any personal strings that you had before completely gone because you've been oppressed like crazy because you get this handout and you're not even allowed to do anything else. When you say you don't have much in common with most Swedes, do you mean because you are libertarian and many Swedes, at least stereotypically, are collectivist? I guess that's part of it. But I think Swedes, in a sense, Sweden is very, very libertarian in the social or political sense, but not in the economic sense. The Swedish is a very strange case, really. And Swedes would probably agree with you if you just give them some points that are very libertarian. So I wouldn't say that you feel very oppressed as a Swede in Sweden, except for if you do something economically. And of course you do that all the time. But that's not really what I mean by saying that I'm not like most other Swedes. I would say that I have a different viewpoint. And this is really a cultural thing that most Swedes and most Canadians in general, really, they have this view that, well, who do you think you are, basically? It's the law of Dante that it's on Wikipedia for anyone who wants to look it up. It's really a jealousy thing. So you're not supposed to make money. You're not supposed to be successful. You're not supposed to even try much because people will not respect you for it. People will not like that you're successful. They will hate you for it because you make them look bad. So it's in that sense, it's very egalitarian. But at the same time, everybody's cheating on their taxes. Everybody's selling and buying goods and services in the black market. Of course they are because the taxes are so freaking high. But there is some sort of weird morality where you're cheating on taxes is completely fine unless you're a celebrity and it's in the media. But accepting handouts from the government without really being eligible, that is not OK. That's interesting. You bring this up because this idea of striving or conspicuously having more money than your neighbors is also very frowned upon in places like Scotland and Australia. So it's not just a Swedish phenomenon, but in America, this is accepted. And it's more than accepted, I would say, because at least on the surface, because if someone is doing something great or has a nice title or a degree or something, people go, wow, yeah, congratulations. That's awesome. But in Sweden, they go, yes, so what? I mean, who do you think you are? Well, maybe you're the wrong person to ask, because I agree with you entirely about nationalism and viewing ourselves as as members of a nation state where anarcho capitalists, we get that. But devil's advocate, wouldn't wouldn't something be lost a nation, not a state? If Sweden were to become 80 percent North African and Middle East Muslims, wouldn't the old Sweden be lost? And isn't this something more than just creative destruction and market phenomenon, wouldn't this be something that the state has engineered or states working in concert have engineered? Would that not make you sad as a Swede? If the Sweden of your childhood was completely obliterated culturally? I probably would, but those are my personal opinions and my own subjective valuations. It's not really a basis for policy. And I'm telling you that just Sweden, Sweden now compared to when I grew up, it's very different. But it's different not only because of immigration, but it's different because of cultural changes. It's different because people do different things. People travel a little bit more today. And people or Sweden is less prosperous today than it was when I grew up. I mean, when I grew up, the government was at its peak and all the benefits were amazing. You get everything was free, basically. Today, there are cutbacks because you can't afford it. And that affects how people behave, too, because taxes have been cut, but not all that much. But benefits have been cut even more because the government simply can't afford it. And that's a big part of Swedish society. I mean, the redistribution. I don't blame non-libertarians for sort of rolling their eyes and saying, look, you guys, we're so far from all of this right here right now. I want a border wall and no more Mexicans. I mean, I think that's wrong, but I get it. The whole discussion on consequences and public policy and how to deal with one step in one direction or the other. Those are completely weird for me as a libertarian. And it's really the example that Walter Block gives as a paradox. I think he's done that a few times when I've listened to myself. Do we ask libertarians and tax rates for lower tax income for the government? Because considering, assuming that the Laffer curve is correct and the tax rate is at the top part, you could lower the rate and that will increase the government's income and vice versa. So what do we do as libertarians? Well, this has nothing to do with libertarian principles to me. This is really a matter of personal opinion. How does it affect you as a person? But the libertarian policy is no tax. It's really that simple because you can argue back and forth whether the tax rate or what about deductions and things like that. Or is it the income to government that matters? Well, it's really how the government uses the funds and so forth. So you can have arguments both ways, and both are really bad as well. And so it's not really a paradox because we don't want to advocate for certain policies with the federal government or whoever. We want to get rid of it. That's the solution. We don't want to keep chopping a little bit at the branches of evil. We want to want to strike at the roots, get rid of the freaking thing. And I think that's the important point. And that's why I think Murray was right. Tactically, incrementalism doesn't work for us. It works for progressives. Well, absolutely. It's like boiling the frog, right? That's incrementalism. You put the frog in the pot on your stove with cold water. If you put and you increase the heat slowly and it's going to be boiled alive. But if you try to put the frog in a boiling pot of water, it's going to jump straight out. And it works only one way. Gradualism works or incrementalism works one way and it works towards bigger government because there's always a backside. There always going to be some sort of misallocation of resources, if you will. If you roll back government one step or if you add one little piece of government and we can't support those misallocations either way. That's not that's not the libertarian case. The libertarian case is get rid of it all. All the inefficiency is gone. Then let's build it anew. That's the libertarian case as far as I'm concerned. Well, Pear, I want to thank you so much for joining us this weekend and dealing with some of these very tough questions. And again, we're not talking about trying to create a utopia. We're trying to talk about dealing with very intractable problems of human migration and poverty in ways that produce the best outcome, not necessarily a perfect outcome. Pear, how can people find out more about you or follow you on Twitter or I believe you have a website of your own as well? Yes, I do have a website on my own. That's pearbilant.com, P-E-R-B-Y-L-U-N-D.com. And my Twitter handle is pretty obvious as well as Pearbilant, as Pearbilant. And those would probably be the best places to find me. Be sure to check out Pear's article, Refugees and Migrants in a World of Government Meddling, which we ran earlier this week on Mises.org. If you're a libertarian and you're interested in this issue of immigration and the proper libertarian analysis, I guarantee you you will find this article to be really foundational and it might just change your thinking. Pear, thanks so much for your time today. Ladies and gentlemen, have a great weekend.