Private property anarchism, of the kind advocated by German-born Austrian economist Hans-Herman Hoppe, is strongly critical of open borders and open immigration policies.
Hoppe is known for making a libertarian argument favouring state-controlled immigration restrictions from a private property perspective. He argues that, when considering the skewed balance between those who pay the most in tax and those who produce less while benefitting from statism, an uninvited immigrant welfare recipient is akin to an aggressor or invader.
To make his argument, Hoppe states that free trade in goods requires a sender and a receiver since goods don’t have a will of their own. Trade is mutually beneficial, as transactions only happen when both parties benefit. However, Hoppe argues that this does not happen with immigration:
‘There can be shipments (immigrants) without willing domestic recipients. In this case, immigrants are foreign invaders, and immigration represents an act of invasion. Surely, a government’s basic protective function includes the prevention of foreign invasions and the expulsion of foreign invaders.’
An example of this would be an asylum seeker who arrives in a new country without the consent of the local populace and pitches a tent in a city park. But it is difficult to make the same argument when we consider economic migrants, those migrating to seek employment. Someone from Frankfurt seeking employment in Berlin comes over ‘uninvited’. However, this person would still require the voluntary cooperation of a willing employer to provide work and a willing landlord to provide shelter. The overly harsh language of ‘foreign invaders’ could just as aptly be used for someone coming over uninvited from another neighbourhood as from another country.
Are immigrants foreign invaders?
Hoppe argues that the distinction matters, however: that freedom of movement within a country does not lead to significant issues, but if a nation had open borders with the entire world, the consequences would be ruinous:
‘Can there be any doubt how disastrous such an experiment would turn out in the present world?. The U.S., and Switzerland even faster, would be overrun by millions of third-world immigrants, because life on and off American and Swiss public streets is comfortable compared to life in many areas of the third world. Welfare costs would skyrocket, and the strangled economy disintegrate and collapse, as the subsistence fund—the stock of capital accumulated in and inherited from the past—was plundered. Civilization in the U.S. and Switzerland would vanish, just as it once did from Rome and Greece.’
This is the equivalent of ‘import the third world, become the third world’. But even though the claim is often repeated, it is much harder to find actual examples. There are counterexamples, however. The US had very few immigration restrictions up until quotas were instituted in 1921. Few people argue that this ‘experiment’ turned out to be disastrous.
More recent examples exist as well. Puerto Rico became a US territory in 1898 and Puerto Ricans had the right to freely move to the US a few years afterwards. Did they all move into the US? No, since it took until 2006 for the Puerto Rican population in the US to surpass the population in Puerto Rico. The same thing can be said of EU member states. You don’t see people from poorer EU countries ‘overrunning’ higher-wage EU countries. So yes, there can be doubts about whether reducing immigration restrictions will be disastrous.
Has Europe’s immigration experience been disastrous?
Before you answer this question, let’s take a step back. Imagine you meet someone with ‘climate anxiety’. This person constantly exposes himself to news about droughts, floods, heatwaves and other extreme weather events. You might argue that this person is so anxious because he is constantly being exposed to bad news. Even though the news might refer to factual climate issues, it doesn’t follow that overall trends show the world is ending.
You might even try to convince this person by reading the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. These IPCC reports might contain some bias (since they never mention the positive effects of climate change), but they don’t over-exaggerate the issues and suggest that the apocalypse is around the corner. Reading an IPCC report will provide a more balanced view on climate change than much scaremongering propaganda in the mainstream news.
How is this relevant? It is relevant because the political right has a different boogeyman: immigrants. Anecdotes about migrants raping, stealing, murdering, etc. regularly fill up people’s newsfeeds. While individual anecdotes might be just as factual as extreme weather events, they give a distorted picture of what is happening in Europe. Crime has been on a downward trajectory for the past decade:
Sceptics might argue that this downward trend is because people are less likely to report crime nowadays. However, homicide rates (which are unlikely to be underreported) show an even stronger downward trajectory:
It is true, statistically, that certain migrant groups have higher crime rates than others. Crime rates also differ by gender, age, and ethnic group. This does not mean we should limit people’s freedom if they are arbitrarily part of a group with a higher crime profile. For the libertarian, for whom the unit of analysis is the individual, the relevant question is how to combat crime while upholding the principle of innocence until proven guilty. If someone does not want to consider ways of fighting crime other than limiting immigration, then their crime concerns are not genuine.
For example, governments like to cater to voters’ feelings by spending money on increased police presence on the streets. But the police rarely catch criminals red-handed while patrolling a neighbourhood. Criminal investigation teams catch criminals. And these teams are often underfunded. A libertarian solution could be to set up a system of rewards for registered ‘bounty hunters’ to access reported crime records and help the police arrest suspected criminals.
Of course, there are other criticisms of immigration. But it is clear that liberal approaches to free movement are not leading to civilizational collapse, as Hoppe argued above. In fact, there might be too little immigration in Europe, where the foreign-born are only 6.1% of the total population compared to 30% in Switzerland. In the United Arab Emirates, the native population has in fact been ‘replaced’ by foreigners, who comprise 88% of the population. But still, they haven’t experienced a ‘strangled’ economy that collapsed nor a vanished civilization, ‘just as it once did from Rome and Greece’.
There even seems to be a correlation that OECD countries with a higher percentage of foreigners score higher in an economic freedom index than those with fewer foreigners. This doesn’t necessarily mean that ‘more immigrants = more (economic) freedom’. But the opposite can’t be proven either. We can all imagine a hypothetical situation where dedicated communists become a majority in a country and outvote the native population. But these are hypotheticals: most people just want to better their lives rather than promote abstract political ideals (‘The Political Brain’ by Drew Westen and ‘The Myth of the Rational Voter’ by Bryan Caplan are recommended readings).
What about the Hoppean ideal?
In the Hoppean ideal, all property would be privately owned. This means there would be no state and no state borders. There would be no legal distinction between natives and foreigners. This does not mean that there would be no borders at all: each plot of land would be owned by someone, so private property boundaries would reign supreme. No freedom of movement exists unless someone is admitted by the property owner. This is best contrasted with the current status quo:
‘(…) by proceeding on public roads, or with public means of transportation, and in staying on public land and in public parks and buildings, an immigrant can potentially cross every domestic resident’s path, even move into anyone’s immediate neighborhood and practically land on his very doorsteps.’
To stop immigrants from going to people’s doorsteps, the Hoppean solution is to make sure immigrants have a ‘valid invitation’. This could be a contract between a domestic citizen and an immigrant. The contract ensures that the inviting party ‘assumes legal responsibility for the actions of his invitee for the duration of his stay. The inviter is held liable to the full extent of his property for any crimes the invitee commits against the person or property of any third party’.
But let us consider this premise at its full conclusion. The Hoppean ideal, properly realized, would actually allow for more immigration, not less. Why? Because any citizen can invite an immigrant, and any liability risks can be minimized through insurance and security deposits. Hoppe’s ‘invite only’ immigration system would actually be less restrictive than many current immigration processes in the western world, which in some instances can take years, with would-be citizens living in a bureaucracy-plagued limbo.
Think about it. Any citizen can sell invites to immigrants in exchange for an amount that would more than cover the liability insurance. Granted, such an invitation system would have the benefit of limiting welfare moochers, as Hoppe intends, but overall the Hoppean ‘invite only’ immigration system would increase overall migration, not limit it. The same conclusion applies for Hoppe’s private property anarchism, as there wouldn’t even be a legal distinction between ‘foreigners’ and ‘citizens’.
There are libertarians on either side of the immigration debate, with wildly differing perspectives on how to approach free movement and free association. While not solving the divide entirely, perhaps the invitation approach could be seen as a step in the right direction for both parties: for the restrictionists, it provides a means of substituting ‘undesirable’ immigration with ‘desirable’ immigration (i.e, limiting unproductive migrants while maintaining a property owner’s right to house, host, and hire on their own property). For the free movement libertarians, it provides a means of making immigration more accessible, more plentiful, and less bureaucratic.
A system based on private property anarchism could potentially bring more openness and accessibility to immigration, rather than less. Innovative solutions can emerge from libertarian principles: by focusing on individual responsibility and voluntary invitation, we could bypass bureaucratic restrictions while still safeguarding against potential threats to social harmony—offering greater free association and mutual benefit in the movement of individuals across borders.
