Once during a House of Commons vote on a bill to liberalize abortion laws, Margaret Thatcher, a Methodist standing with the “nays”, looked around and asked, “Where are the Papists?”
Similarly, as the debate on immigration policy grows in volume and venom, I wonder, Where are the libertarians? Ordinarily, they’re a noisy bunch – and not at all hesitant about exposing their disagreements with others on the political Right. Abortion, same-sex marriage, the “war on drugs”: You needn’t listen hard to hear their cries in behalf of an expansive view of individual liberty.
Yet, when the argument turns to the freedom to travel across international borders for peaceful purposes and to offer one’s services to a willing buyer without interference from the State, voices that loudly advocate laissez faire in sex, drugs and music rarely speak up for freedom in the market for labor. I haven’t tried to track down the exceptions (I know of a few, such as David Zincavage at Never Yet Melted), but hunting for them shouldn’t be necessary. You can find more pro-abortion libertarians in half a minute than pro-immigration ones in half a week. (It’s interesting to observe what a small proportion of the signers of today’s anti-restrictionist op-ed in the Wall Street Journal are identifiable libertarians; most are traditional right-wingers or neocons.)
Having no special animus against libertarianism, little though I agree with much in its contemporary incarnation (scroll down to 12/19/01), I’ll refrain from devising snarky explanations for this strange silence. I do feel qualified, however, to declare that it is foolish as a matter of both principle and tactics.
Tactically, the absence of libertarian pressure makes it easier for the Congressional Republican leadership to plow forward toward defeat in November. With much assistance from the Right side of the commentariat and blogosphere, it has proclaimed an immigration “crisis” – about which it proposes to talk without acting. Instead of legislation, we have road shows designed to whip the party’s base into a state of alarm, and to innoculate it against all rational compromise. This strategy, if one may dignify it with that word, guarantees one of two disastrous outcomes: No action and the appearance of ineffectual dithering, or passage of a bill that yields ground to immigration proponents and sparks desertion by the “betrayed” conservative base.
On other contentious issues, Republicans have demonstrated the ability to uphold their principles without abandoning a sense of the possible. Hence, we offer incremental restrictions on abortion rather than an all-or-nothing Human Life Amendment, and direct our fire at judicial imposition of same-sex marriage without trying to revive anti-sodomy laws. Recognition of libertarian interests plays a large role in those astutely fashioned positions. But libertarians seemingly don’t care about immigration, leaving the field to those who do care, that is, to the Tancredos and Krikorians and other Kos-like restrictionist hotheads.
The intellectual consequences will take longer to bear fruit but are equally poisonous. If we come to care only about liberty for Americans, how long will we continue to care about even that? If it is no infringement of libertarian principles to close our borders to low-paid, culturally different Mexicans, shouldn’t it likewise be acceptable libertarian policy for California to keep out low paid, culturally different Alabamians, or San Francisco to erect barriers against those odd people from Fresno?
The concept of universal liberty grew historically out of the peculiar liberties of particular places, ranks and individuals. Shouldn’t libertarians worry about running that progression in reverse, so that Liberty shrinks back into the womb of privilege? For others on the Right, whose ideas are less grounded in the Enlightenment, that development might not be a major problem, but I don’t see how any libertarian can welcome, much less tacitly encourage, it.
There are ample opportunities to fashion sensible immigration rules that will reduce the risk of terrorist infiltration (the restrictionists’ one legitimate worry) while allowing labor markets to operate with as much freedom as possible. Rep. Mike Pence has put forward proposals to that end (which bear some resemblance to my own, I modestly note), only to become a target of restrictionist invective. It would be nice if, in turn, his efforts on behalf of liberty received the backing of those who worship most ostentatiously at its shrine.
Representing for the Libertarians.
Libertariansim is not concerned primarily with universal liberty. Since government is necessary for each individual region or nation, the question is how must the individual government be bound and limited so as to allow the most possible liberty while combatting the least possible tyrany not only among those it governs but among itself.
Historically speaking and speaking from the lips of the fathers themselves, tyranny has always come to a homeland through its reaching into the outside world. Thus, the way to ensure liberty at home is to focus on home--wherever your home may be. It may not be universal, but it is pragmatic and necessary. That is why we "care only about our own liberty" and wish others well. Their liberty is their own. To think that we can take the power and responsibility away from them to help them is defeating what Libertarianism stands for.
Posted by: slaveofone | Sunday, August 13, 2006 at 02:46 PM