 Look, I'm an ANCAP, so if you asked me what the ideal immigration policy would be, it would be that we wouldn't have an immigration policy, and that's my ideal foreign policy is that we wouldn't have foreign policy, and my ideal economic policy is that we wouldn't have economic policy. I think that if we lived in an anarcho-capitalist society, and every plot of land was either unowned or privately owned, then essentially immigration doesn't exist, and people can move to where they are invited, or they can homestead unowned land or something like that. So that would be my ideal. I think the more relevant question for libertarians is under this current very not libertarian order where all of us are trying to move to a free society, or at least a freer society than we have, how should we think about immigration while there is this gigantic state, the biggest state in the history of the world that we're living under? And my position on that has been that I believe libertarians should reject open borders. That is not something that is deduced from libertarian principles. I think basically what it comes down to is a question of government property. Now, obviously, in the border, particularly in Texas, there are parts of the border that are privately owned where the landowner, the property owners, are explicitly asking the government to serve their one legitimate function, which is the protection of property. And so in that case, I think it's very easy for a libertarian to say that, yes, they have every right to stop people from trespassing on their property. And if government is to exist at all, that is their only legitimate function. And so I think it's very easy for a libertarian to say, yes, the government should assist them in protecting their property. But more largely with the question of how to handle government property, I think many libertarians treat it almost as a given that there are kind of ought to not be restrictions on government property. Now, I know that's not exactly Chris's position, but I think that when arguing against libertarians who don't support open borders, many open borders proponents still almost act as if that is the libertarian given, which I just think it is not. Government property is created and maintained by taxpayers. They are forced at the threat of violence to give over their money in order to maintain this government property. And I don't think that it follows from that, that it's unowned or that it is owned by everyone equally. And I essentially would say that if you were to believe that, then you would get taken in some very strange directions. So libertarians believe, say, for example, that people have a right to do heroin. You own your body. You can put in it whatever you want to. It doesn't necessarily follow from that that I believe you ought to be allowed to do heroin right outside of a public school or maybe even enter the public school and do it in the girl's bathroom if you feel like doing it there. Government and government property is less than ideal by the nature that it exists. But as long as it does exist, I think libertarians can support reasonable restrictions. And I think that the influx of seven million undocumented illegal aliens during Joe Biden's administration is way beyond the level of reasonable. I would point out that it's very hard to get good polling on open borders because it's so unpopular that no one even asks it in any of the surveys. I saw one recent poll that said it was something like 7% of people believe there should be less immigration restrictions. Whatever the percentage of that that actually believes in zero restrictions, I'd imagine, is a small percentage of that set. The point is basically that overwhelmingly the people in this country who have been forced at the threat of violence to fund this government do not want open borders. And the government is intentionally allowing millions of people to flood into this country. And I do not believe that the libertarian position is to cheer on the government doing something to the people with their money that they do not want done. So that would be, I guess, how I'd open this. Okay, Chris. Yeah, thanks and thanks to you all for bringing this together. Thanks, Dave, for debating. As bad as a communist, was that as bad as a communist? Maybe I can convince you otherwise, I don't know. But yeah, I mean, I think that on many of these points, we actually agree. I think it probably will come out during this discussion. Really, the crux of the disagreement is what counts as reasonable restrictions. But before I get to that, I'll just sort of lay out a little bit about why I'm an open borders person. And here again, I suspect that Dave isn't going to disagree with what I'm saying up to a point at least. But so I think there is this presumption from a libertarian point of view in favor of open borders. So the idea is something like this. You own your property, you have freedom of association. And so just as I, someone who's living in West Virginia, am free to invite someone from, say, Pennsylvania to come into West Virginia to say, I don't know, attend a Super Bowl party at my house. It seems like I have the right to do that. Why? I have the freedom of association. I have private property rights. And so if I'm hosting someone in my house, it seems like we shouldn't have a problem with that from a libertarian perspective. Similarly, if I own a business in West Virginia and I want to hire someone who currently lives in Pennsylvania, they can cross the state border, they can come work for me. If I have housing that I want to sell in West Virginia to someone who currently lives in Pennsylvania, they can move to West Virginia and they can buy that housing. So this seems all perfectly acceptable from a libertarian perspective. And so in terms of what an open borders policy would look like, I think it's probably not too far off from what the current sort of open border policy between individual United States is. So like I said, if you live in one state, you're free to move to different states. Now there are some restrictions on free movement that I think everybody's going to accept. So if somebody committed a murder in Pennsylvania and gets stopped in West Virginia, then I think everybody's going to say, well, okay, it's perfectly legitimate to restrict their freedom of movement, put them in prison and so on. But aside from those sorts of cases, you're more or less permitted to move freely across state borders. And so the open borders position is basically take that model and then apply it to national borders. So if somebody from Canada wants to buy housing for me or work for me, they should be allowed to do that. And as far as the justification for that goes, like I said, it seems like your rights of private property entitle you to do that, your rights of freedom of association entitle you to do that. And also just reflecting on the situations in my own life when I have moved, you might move for a different job or you might move to be close to friends and family. You might move because you like the political structures in one state rather than another. These are all equally good reasons to move across national borders. And so again, the sort of basic picture of open borders is take the current model that we have for movement between states and then apply it to national borders. And I suspect we'll get into this more sort of in the back and forth. But I mean, I agree with Dave that the idea that there should be no restrictions whatsoever on the use of public property is not a good position. So there have to be some restrictions. And so really the debate is what sort of restrictions are going to be justified and which ones aren't. And my main objection to arguments against open borders that rely on this appeal to public property is that in many cases they would have sort of un-libertarian objection or I'm sorry, un-libertarian implications. So here again, I think both Dave and I agree no restrictions is probably not the correct position saying that the state can do whatever it wants in terms of restrictions is also probably not the right position. And so then the question is, okay, what sorts of restrictions are justified? And I think we don't need a full blown libertarian theory of public property to differentiate between good and bad reasons for restricting someone's access to the use of public property. So for example, you say, okay, we got public roads. What's a good reason to restrict someone's access to a public road? You might say, well, if they're dangerous, so if they've been drinking, if they're speeding excessively, you say, okay, you might say no longer should they have the right to access the public road because they're dangerous to other people. But we can also come up with bad reasons. To restrict someone's access to public property. So you might say, I don't know, if the government says if you are caught listening to, I don't know, punk music, I don't like punk music. But if you're caught listening to punk music in your car, we're gonna deny you access to a public road. It's like, well, that's a bad reason. I don't think we would accept that as a good reason. And so then the question really becomes are the sorts of reasons that non-open borders libertarians give in favor of restricting people's access to public property, good ones. And I'm inclined to think not. And so I'll just, I'll give one case. And then I think we could probably move on. But so like one argument is that we need to restrict access to things like public roads, because if we have high levels of immigration, this will lead to an increased tax burden for citizens or something like that. And there's an empirical question about whether or not that claim is true. But more generally, it just seems like we can't deny people access to a public road on the grounds that they're, they might use that road to do something that will increase a taxpayer's burden. So for example, I think most libertarians would say you should be allowed to ride a motorcycle without a helmet on a public road. But that increases the odds that you're gonna get into like an accident that requires the use of like publicly funded health facilities to fix. And so if the principal or the reason is something like we can restrict someone's access to a public road, when we think their use of the public road will increase taxpayers burdens, that's gonna have very non-libertarian implications in a lot of cases that have nothing to do with immigration. So I'll leave it at that, but I'm happy to go into more depth later. Okay, Dave, you have up to 10 minutes to respond to any of that. Okay, so I agree with a lot of what Chris said. I do think that it's, and this is one of the things that I've been critical of libertarians about on this issue. I think that sometimes we're living too much in theory and not marrying that theory with the real world. So when Chris says the example of like, or whatever your example is, but hey, if I have a cousin who lives in Italy and I invite my cousin over to my house and say, hey, I want you to come over here and a government agent gets in the way of that. Well, yeah, clearly that's not libertarian. Like I invited him over and this is my property who has a right to tell me that I can't invite who I want to onto my property. But however, here in the real world, what's happening is that uninvited people are flooding in by the millions. They were not invited by anybody. We have caravans and the tens of thousands coming regularly of people who nobody invited. And in fact, every state government is arguing over who can ship them over to the other state and dump them on them and nobody wants them. And to me, this kind of gets at the court like this is the other side of the argument is that yes, it is true that from the libertarian position, if you are invited, you should have a right to go onto that person's property. But it's also true from the libertarian position that you have absolutely no right to enter property that you don't own uninvited. That is what we would call trespassing, which is what's going on in a very... So you have a libertarian error on both sides of this equation. And then the question becomes, well, how exactly with the existence of a government do we best work this out? And Hans Hermann Hoppe, who is very demonized, I think, by libertarians who support open borders, despite the fact that I really think the guy is worth reading and not just isolating for most controversial passages. But his proposal was that we should just... Libertarians should support a sponsorship system where invited people can come so long as someone invites them and vouches for them that they won't be a burden on the taxpayer and they'll be responsible for them. And uninvited people can't come. Now, that would require securing the border. But I think that, to me, that's probably the best way to simulate a libertarian situation in a status paradigm. So I would say that that's the main thing that people should focus on is that the real-world problem is uninvited people coming, not invited people coming. And I'll probably grant Chris and agree with him that the amount of red tape and regulation for legal immigration is insane. And that's part of the reason it incentivizes people to not wait in line because it's so difficult to actually go through the process. But the major crisis, the reason why this is the number two or in some polls, the number one issue for voters in 2024 is because we have massive waves of uninvited illegal immigrants coming into this country. And then, of course, they're also just being put right on the dole as soon as they get here. In terms of the comparison between moving back and forth between states and moving back and forth between, say, South America or the rest of the world in here, I mean, look, the glaring difference is that we don't have a massive problem of uninvited people moving back and forth between states. You don't see just like 100,000 people marching from Georgia into South Carolina. And if you did, we'd start having a real problem and Georgia would start thinking about and just expecting government services when they got there. And if that were the case, yeah, there'd be a real political issue in South Carolina of how to deal with this. So I will say that I'm glad we can kind of concede that zero restrictions doesn't work and that there are restrictions that could be bad. So I think that that in itself kind of destroys Chris's point by saying that there could be bad implications of restrictions because we've already acknowledged that, yes, there could be bad implications of restrictions. There also could be bad implications of a lack of restrictions. If you're asking where exactly we say the reasonable restrictions land, well, I would say that if you have the overwhelming majority, and I'm not, I mean, like you cannot find an issue that Americans are more united on than opposing open borders. Good luck finding opposing pedophiles, maybe. I don't know what would top the 90 plus percent of Americans who are all against open borders. But if you have a situation where you know that the overwhelming majority, 90 plus percent of property owners are not inviting these people, are explicitly saying, we do not want these people to come here. We have too many problems. We cannot deal with this also. And we as libertarians know that. And then I would also argue, we can get into this later, that the government is intentionally allowing this to happen against the will of all the property owners. I think that more than meets the threshold of reasonable to be on the side of restrictions in that case. Okay. And we're going to let Chris do an uninterrupted response. And then Liz and I are going to jump into this conversation and have a little bit more of an unstructured conversation between all of us. So Chris, go ahead and reply to anything of note that you think Dave has brought up in his rebuttal or introduction. Yeah, sure. So I mean, I think you're sort of alluding to this point towards the end of your comments there. But here again, we might be in a, that if we had a system where it was much easier to move to the United States legally, then something like a sponsorship or some sort of invitation program would probably function a lot better. And I mean, but the thing is like, that might get us pretty close to functionally open borders. So for example, if it were very easy for employers to post advertisements for jobs that immigrants could apply for. And then if they got the job, they could be sponsored by their employer. I mean, I think that would have, that would result in considerably more immigration than we actually have. Would it get us to open borders? Maybe not. But I think it would get us a lot closer than the status quo. And also there are other sorts of what economists sometimes call keyhole solutions to some of these problems. So if the worry is immigrants, taxing public infrastructure and so on. And so being taxed consumers or something like that. Well, one option might be something like an entrance fee for prospective immigrants. So you move here, but whatever it is that we think is going to be consumed in taxes, they have to pay up front or maybe the government can garnish their salaries, something like that. I'm not, so I still think pure open borders is better than that, but I also think that sort of middle ground position is much better than the status quo. So here again, if we're worried about the fiscal burden created by immigrants, which again, like I said, I'm not convinced that the empirical evidence bears that out. But if it is the case, you could just say, okay, maybe you have to pay a special entrance fee in terms of the invitation. I mean, here again, I don't know. Like I think that maybe people in Texas don't like when people from California move there. I don't know. But like I could imagine people in Texas being like, look, like all these Californians are moving to Texas. And we didn't invite them. Well, okay. But I still think it's permissible for them to use roads in Texas and to buy housing from Texas property owners and to work for Texas employers, even if they're not explicitly invited. I think they still would have the right to use those roads. And then on the point about it being very unpopular, I mean, it is unpopular, but like most of what libertarians say is unpopular. So if we're gonna let people decide what is and is not permissible, that's not so good for libertarians in general. Like forget immigration. Like you said, we wanna have heroin on the shelves of 7-Eleven. Like that's not very popular either. And so like I'm just very wary of appealing to popular opinion in the case of a policy like this, because I think that might lead to a lot of unlibertarian conclusions. So just to take another case, if it turned out that 90% of Americans, which this price may be plausible, are against legalizing certain sorts of drugs, I'm not convinced that would still be a moral justification for restricting the transportation of those drugs on a public road. Or if 90% of my neighbors don't want me to sell my house to someone, because they said, well, we didn't invite this person. We don't want this person living here. I would say, well, yeah. I mean, you might not like it, but nevertheless, my property right entitles me to sell my house to this person, whether or not you approve of it. And so I think the same principle holds in the case of immigration. So if I wanna sell my house to someone who's coming from another country, if 90% of my neighbors don't like it, I say too bad. In the same way there's 90% of my neighbors say, you know, I don't want you to marry that person, or I don't want that, you know, to associate with that person in your house in our neighborhood. That's too bad. It's not, it's not up for majority vote.