 Our guest this weekend is Dr. Guido Halsmann, a senior fellow here at the Mises Institute and a professor of economics at the University of Angers in France. And while Guido teaches in France, he's originally from Germany, so we thought we'd ask him about immigration and the ongoing migrant crisis in Europe from the perspective of Mises, Rothbard and Hoppe. We talk about the critical distinction between nation and state about who actually owns so-called public property and ought to control it and whether the concept of open borders is actually a big government status construct. Stay tuned for a great interview with Dr. Guido Halsmann. So Dr. Halsmann, good morning and thanks so much for being with us. It's my pleasure to be with you here. And welcome back to Auburn, we're looking forward to your talk later today. Yeah, it's always good to come back to my academic home. Since you're here and you're in Auburn, we thought we would talk about an issue that's very much in the Western media and especially in the U.S. press, the issue of immigration and a migration crisis in Europe, you're German, but you live and work in France. Can you tell us personally any changes you've seen over the last five years or two years in terms of the effect of immigrants in either one of those countries? In France, in my own, in the town where I live, in Angers, so there has been a significant immigration in the past five years, I would say in particular. When I arrived in 2004, there was hardly, Angers was a typical traditional French city with very low immigrant population in the city, about 10% or less. And that has increased, I would say today is probably closer to 15% or 20%. So it's not an extreme change, but I mean, it's a significant change, in particular because we got lots of immigrants two or three years ago from Africa. So they stick out more than the others because you can identify them by skin color. So you sense to a greater extent is this wave of new arrivals. In Germany, we've seen this in the news, the changes have been more dramatic, especially last year. A similar thing happened in France. So it's really a phenomenon that was limited to Germany, Austria to some extent, then also Sweden and Denmark. And I have not witnessed this personally because I didn't travel to Germany in the past six months, but I will go there actually next week. So if we do another interview at the end of the month, I can give you my first impressions. Well, you've studied the work of Mises to a great extent. You're a biographer of Mises. In a later edition of Human Action, he talked about the potential need for migration barriers to protect against an aggressor in, let's say, in wartime. Can you tell us a little bit about Mises, his view of human migration and what he would think of things today? Well, Mises was a liberal in the classic cost of the word. So he was opposed to government interventions. And what governments do is, well, they can actually slow down artificially, forceful by compulsion and coercion, the flow of migrants. So out of a country and into a country. Out of a country, we've seen this in the case of the Soviet bloc where the governments prevented their people from leaving and then also immigration into a country where governments imposing limits. For example, it was a traditional policy in the United States in the 19th century and also until fairly recent times in the 20th century and also in countries such as Australia, New Zealand and so on. There were always some government control on immigration flows. So this being said, what needs to be added right away is that, of course, government can not only slow down immigration artificially through violence, but they can also enforce inflation artificially through violence. And this is an important point that has been made by Mises' friend, William Röpke, writing in the 1940s. So Röpke had a similar background in personal experience as Mises. Well, he was not Austrian, he was German. But so he lived through the very difficult periods of the 1930s and gave a lot of thought to questions of migration, immigration. And he came up to this distinction, well, there's something like a natural flow of migration and that can be impeded, hampered by government intervention in both directions. So governments can both prevent that people come together who wish to live together and who wish to integrate, but they can also impose migrants on a host population, which would be just as bad. So Mises did not stress this in his writings of the 1940s, but as you have said, he eventually came around to endorse this point and said, well, we need to be careful who we let into the country. Because the liberty that we enjoy depends on the fact that people actively support the Constitution of Liberty so that the government of a free country and that they support free enterprise and so on. So if we let Nazis into the countries and Bolsheviks and so on, on mass, then of course we run the danger that these people might influence the turn of elections. So the wrong governments get to power and so on. Well, Rothbard wrote about immigration and man economy in state. He viewed it at that stage in his writing as just a form of government intervention that was designed to artificially keep wages high for the inhabitants of a particular region. Later on, he wrote this fantastic article from my perspective, Nations by Consent, and he seems to have changed and morphed a little bit and he talks about how the collapse of the former USSR affected his view. He's just talking about nations versus states. So could you elaborate a little bit on Rothbard on immigration? Well, I must say I read the essay about the time when it appeared. It was one of those writings, I think, that appeared posthumously. But I didn't study it again, so I could not comment in our detail on it. What I remember is indeed a strange of mind, which was remarkable, but which is finally, Rothbard rallied himself. That is how I experienced it at the time. He rallied himself to the Rubkin position so that government intervention can operate in both ways. It can prevent people from coming together, but it can also impose visitors that you do not really like. Just as we would not let everybody into our living room or into our property, it's natural also that you have the same reflex as far as the nation is concerned. The nation, as opposed to the state, is, well, the organic community of people who share a common political project. That's how it is typically defined in modern terms. The old Germanic definition was, well, you have common ancestry, so you belong to the same tribes, so to say the nation is some sort of a big family of tribes that share this common past and therefore are imbued with the same values and so on. Now, the nation understood in this way is independent of the state. You can have a political community without a common organization, so you can very well have a nation without a government, at least a modern state, as we know it. You can have a nation in the Germanic sense without any particular political project that is being shared by everybody or without a common government. The nation then in a free society, in a free setting where there's no intervention by force, no violation of property rights, a nation is an organic body that develops or evolves spontaneously. It's not something monolithic that stays the same as, let's say, ethnic purity or something that is preserved as a political purity that remains the same throughout the course of the time, but it changes under the impact of millions of individual decisions. The changes that occur are bottom-up. They start in individual decision-making or in choices that are made within families and so on and then ultimately come to be reflected in the outer appearance of this community that we call a nation. As soon as we have government interventions which might concern the composition of the nation which might seek to give a particular political project or, as I say, a big idea in French, the idea that politics should create a common project for all members of the nation. In that case, of course, the development is no longer organic, but you get the typical consequence that results from government intervention. Do you think modern libertarians make a mistake in the sense that they seem to be hostile to concepts of organic nationalism and even family and culture? Yeah, I think definitely there is some such tendency among libertarians as well as in the general population. Yesterday we talked a little bit about the subject and I told you that I was surprised how strongly public opinion seems to have changed on these questions in Germany because you have a population that is not particularly libertarian in most respects, right? But then on this question of migration, suddenly everybody seemed to rally to the opposition that it's a very bad thing if the government prevents people from coming which is a very strong libertarian positioning in many ways. So it's kind of surprising. So it's not surprising then that libertarians were after all also part of society would be also imbued with the same ideas. Now certainly, again we have to remind ourselves as libertarians, libertarian doesn't mean libertinism, it doesn't mean anything goes. The liberty that we enjoy, the political liberty that we enjoy is based on private property. And so our liberty extends only to the limits of our own property. So that of course has implications also for the flow of migrations. I mean there is no such right just to go to any place you like, right? Nobody has the right to just pop up in my living room and claim that he's unjustly prevented by my door or something or by the walls of my house and so on. And for the same reason I think there is no such right as a categorical right that you go to any place, any other foreign nation or other foreign country is no such right, right? You have the right to the extent that you have the consent of the property owners, the people who help you to go there, you have an airfare carrier and so on so you make a contract with them, you have contractual relationships with people who are running the streets in this and that country, the people who are owning houses where you can render a space or buy a space and so on, to the extent that you get this consent of existing owners, yes you can do this but if you don't have this consent well of course then you are just an intruder by plane and sample. Now the problem that we have is of course public ownership, right? We have public ownership of airports, public ownership of streets and so on and so here we create a political problem. Now this of course is the heart of the question. Now I think from a libertarian point of view we cannot just jump to the conclusion that government should prevent nobody to use public space in this and that way and of course that would be out of the impracticable. For example we have a public library we cannot say well the government should impose no rules on how the books should be used. This is silly just because it's a public property. You cannot do anything that you wish on the street so why should you be free unconditionally without any limitations just to use the street? My point is it doesn't go per se that this is the libertarian position of anything goes as far as public property is concerned. Well Hoppe talks about this. He says that so-called public space really ought to be seen as owned by taxpayers and taxpayer preferences. Actually this is much stronger, it's much more sensible. I think it's more conform to common sense to make this kind of claim. Let me ask you about his point in the sense that imported goods have been ordered by a factory or something in the US and will eventually be paid for whereas there are sometimes wholly uninvited immigrants into a country. Do you think that's a legitimate distinction? Yeah I think absolutely. Immigrants may be welcome to the extent because when they come to a country it's not that you have just barren land that is owned by nobody. In the US you still have large chunks of land that are not used by anybody. Actually they're owned all by the federal government as I understand to some extent by state governments. Okay this is a separate issue but usually if you come to a place that is civilized where people would like to go because they don't want to go into the desert and Nevada and so on into the Rocky Mountains they go to places where there are people and so on. Well all of this already owned by somebody and so we have public space run by politicians elected by finally well by tax payers and are responsible to the citizens who elect them and they have to finance all these projects. So I think yes if you just come you don't have a right just to show up and expect that you should be hosted. This is contrary to common sense. You don't even need to be libertarian to come to this conclusion. Well one final question undoubtedly we're a long way from a hoppy and private property type order. We're going to have public property for the foreseeable future. So given that reality what would you say as a practical matter ought to be a libertarian perspective to let's say immigrant criminality or immigrant abuse of welfare systems in Germany? Well I mean as a practical the most important things that we should stress from a libertarian point of view is that it's not the libertarian position the public space should be used as anything goes. So it's fully a consonant with a libertarian position that the government if it tries to represent the feelings and the objectives of the of the population that has elected it well then it should pursue policies that control to some extent the flow of these people you don't let just anybody in and by the way this is already a current practice in countries that have immigration policies rational immigration policies such as Canada such as Australia such as New Zealand so even for the US this is a fairly recent thing that you just open the doors and their people are cheering and saying well the door should be open for everybody and so on certainly from a libertarian point of view this is not a good policy and finally I should maybe also add another consideration. Of course this policy clearly as far as labour markets is concerned is has at least in the short and in the medium run negative repercussions on those already there the level of revenues of real revenues well depends on the amount of capital that is available the amount of capital does not increase with the kind of immigration that we get from Latin America from Africa and from other countries so necessarily then the remuneration is diluted also already there and so this creates a short run interest. Now the only institution or group of people who benefits from this as a whole are of course politicians and also to some extent people in the financial industries because what you get of course if the population increases you have more factors of production so as a consequence GDP tends to increase overall GDP tends to increase not GDP per capita is precisely the bottom experience of the people at the base but of course for the government this is very important to have an increase of GDP because this means higher tax revenue for the banks it's important that GDP increases because this permits an extension of the credit economy so we have to look at this also by taking these points into consideration and not ending up being just the puppets the useful puppets of the usual interest of parties. Thank you for your time we'll be very interested in your next report from Germany and ladies and gentlemen have a great weekend