Immigration has, for the last 100+ years, anyway, been about providing cheap labor for big limited liability corporations. 

This fear has cropped up since the Know-Nothing Party of the early 1830s. It goes something like this: “Those dirty, disgusting, {insert ethnic food}-eatin’, foreign {insert derogatory name} are gonna take my [job /business/ farm/ majority vote] away from me, and we gotta stop ‘em!” The name of this “cheap labor” changes with the decades: Irish, Italians, Poles, Chinese, Southerners, Arkansawyers, Californians, Mexicans, etc.

Immigration has ALWAYS provided cheap labor, for obvious reasons.  Someone who doesn't speak the local language (or at least not well), who "doesn't know the territory", and who has marginal skills (by local standards) is ALWAYS cheaper: they are paying for the chance to learn.  But from the point of view of the immigrant, immigration is not about cheap labor, but about opportunity, freedom, and a better life.

 And corporations (big or little) are NOT the only beneficiaries of cheap labor:  lots and lots of hardscrabble farms (north, south, and west) benefited, as did a good many middle-class businesses and households, (house servants, handymen, delivery boys, wood-choppers, and you name it), right up until we started limiting immigration.  Only then did the big boys start to get an unfair advantage, although even today there are lots of small farmers and middle-class folks that benefit greatly (directly or indirectly) from illegal migration. 

 Big corporations certainly have much to answer for, but to just blame them, either for the migration or for the policy, is wrong.  In fact, big business must share at least part of the blame for both the perceived negative impacts, and the ever-increasing limits, on immigration. The exploding industrial sector of the 19^th Century in the US certainly looked for cheap labor from wherever they could find it, whether it was freedmen from the South, bog-Irish, Mafia-fleeing Sicilians, or children. Actually, the key period when the corporations really benefited from, and supported, open immigration was from about 1850 to 1910, 100 to 150 years ago.

A recent article available on-line discusses the natural tendency of business to want to limit competition. This economic principle applies to individuals just as much as corporations and partnerships, and to workers as well as capitalists. Naturally, the existing workers in the plants, mines, and shops wanted to limit this cheap foreign labor (and even the cheap kid labor); their unions made (as they continue to do) immigration quotas/bans and child-labor laws priorities for propaganda and legislation. Small businessmen and farmers, who saw the same cheap competition for labor, supported the unions. The corporations opposed these limits; and in the progressive era and the New Deal period, the corporations lost. They responded in two ways: automation, and outsourcing. Thus, we see the long-term effects of limiting the immigration of “cheap labor.”

Automation replaced workers with machinery, and increasingly with machinery controlled by other machines. Whether it was dressing down beeves, sawing up logs into lumber, running trains, or selling sodas, machines have replaced millions and millions of workers, and continue to do so every year.

But the more serious impact has been outsourcing. Outsourcing really started about a century ago, and has accelerated constantly. It started with moving textile factories out of Mass and Rhode Island to South Carolina and Georgia, and moving the stockyards from Chicago and Omaha to Sioux Falls and Sioux City and Hastings. It saw 3M plants move from (or expand from) Minneapolis and Saint Paul to Marshall and Watertown and Aberdeen, GM go from Detroit to Ontario and Tennessee. As it really got rolling, the plants moved to Arkansas and Texas and California, and then to Nuevo Leon and Sonora, Puerto Rico and Japan, and then to Korea and China and Thailand. And more things were outsourced. If you could afford to sell Honduras-grown bananas ten cents a pound, then why couldn’t you afford to sell Chile-grown apples for fifty cents a pound? And if you can sell Colombian coffee for a dollar a pound, then why not Venezuelan flowers for five dollars a dozen? With comm satellites and the internet, you also start having people in Bombay or New Delhi or Jo-burg do your bookkeeping, your software debugging, and your telephone-marketing.

And today, almost in full circle, we actually see small business and some farmers promoting more, rather than less, immigration, so they can compete with the off-shore operations. (Big Labor, on the other hand, appears to be too stupid to understand what happened.)

Today, big corporations are less concerned about cheap labor in the US than they are about the impact of cheap labor on their customers’ incomes or as competition for machinery to replace that labor. Example: If General Widgets Inc. is trying to market an automated chicken-processor (ACP-“From cackling to crispy-fried all in one machine!”), but Grandma’s Poultry Processors LTD can produce chicken cubes cheaper using wetbacks (“Prepared with love!!”), General Widgets ain’t gonna sell as many ACP machines as they want. So now, we have the corporations on what had been the union side, while the unions are now trying to be as successful in stopping outsourcing as they were of stopping cheap labor immigration. (Like I said, stupid.)

Fun and satisfying as it is to blame the corporations for our “immigration crisis,” we have to spread the blame much wider. But the answer to the crisis is STILL liberty.

Some common questions.

The raucous issue of freedom of travel (open borders – open immigration) tends to get very emotional, and with the spread of environmental myths such as the Population Bomb and arguments about sustainability, it is very easy even for lovers of liberty to get caught up in the frenzy. For example, lets look at this comment from a person with reservations about this freedom of travel:

Are we just going to equalize distribution of people across the planet, and end up with several hundred million more people here in what used to be the U.S., having long since forgotten what America used to be about?   --------------

This chimera has been raised by everyone from Popper and Toffler back to the grand vizier of the 2nd Pharoah of the 3rd Dynasty: the idea that resources are limited and if we (the wiser, smarter, stronger, more visionary, etc.) “don't keep them out of the back garden” and "take care of them for their own good" then we will all soon be sucking down Solent Green, and marching 10 abreast. Issues of the solar system and the rest of space aside, places like Switzerland, Scandinavia, and the Netherlands show that population or population density do NOT HAVE TO directly impact on freedom, on liberty. 

But the real problem with this comment is that we aren't going to see equal distribution of population ever.  There are people who LIKE living in Manhattan, just as there were people who LIKED living under the King, or the Kaiser, or the Czar, or Pharaoh, and then there are people who like living in the mountains of New Hampshire or Vermont or Valois or Bern or Colorado, or the Plains of Montana or Wyoming, or the deserts of Arizona or New Mexico (and who like to be free!).  But without significant (usually government) subsidies, there is no way that millions and millions of people can live in some of these places. No matter how crowded Europe or Mesopotamia ever got, you just didn’t find a lot of people in the Arabian Desert or the Sahara. Wyoming, for example, is very unlikely to have more than a million or so people in a free-market economy, even if its 75% public land is open to homesteading. North America is very unlikely to sustain population densities even close to Western Europe for cultural, geographical, economic, and sociological reasons.

But more important is the fact that the American birth of freedom (like England's before it) and its consequent explosion of commercial and technological achievement helped the entire world to have a better way of life, and less reason to move.  No matter how bad life is today in, say Ciudad Mexico, it is orders of magnitude better than life there in, say, 1780, and even more than in, say, 1500.  Same is true in Congo, Zambia, even Tibet! We don’t have much of an immigration problem with Canada, Australia, or even modern Ireland. If people have a good life at home, they are much less likely to want to come to America. And everybody in Mexico doesn’t want to live in Texas or California, much as we sometimes think they do!

One major reason for the population explosion in the “third world” is, I am told, the fact that social customs have not changed as rapidly as technology (medical and agriculture, in particular). Social pressures (coupled with a distressing lack of freedom) produce large families, empty stomachs, and empty pockets. When the benefits of liberty (both freedom and responsibility) are available more widely, they WILL produce those social changes, without outside intervention or “encouragement,” perhaps not as fast as we might like, but fast enough to keep us from getting turned into Trantor or Coruscant. Folks, freedom is the answer.

How DID we get into this mess, Ollie?

We don't worry about migration from California to Colorado (well, we DO grumble), or try to pass laws against it (MOST of us don’t). We do, though, if it is Cuba to Florida. Though there is more freedom and a better standard of living in Colorado than in California, the difference is small, compared to that between Baja California del Sur and Los Angeles.  Free markets and free institutions help reduce differences. This reduces migration, rather quickly in historical terms.  Compare migration from 1800s-era Germanys with migration from Germany after 1955, or Japanese migration before and after WW2 -- more freedom means less reason to move.  Less freedom encourages out-migration (Cuba, Vietnam).

So why this “immigration crisis” today? Why do we even have immigration controls? Some will say that border control is essential to national sovereignty, and a primary function of the military is to keep “them” from coming in. Strange, but the founding fathers didn’t see it that way. We got along fine for decades without border guards, fences, or those quaint little sentry boxes with the tilt-up poles that you used to find all over Europe. Tom and company were concerned about importing slaves, tariffs, and such, but apparently not about a guy jumping off a ship with a knapsack (or not), or a couple with their kids wading ashore. They were concerned about large groups of unaccompanied men bearing weapons and wearing clothes very similar in color, usually with some flags and a horn or drum or such. (Those little kiosks don’t seem to work too well against that sort of thing – one needs to have an alert system, and lots of folks with nice weapons and lots of ammo, and maybe some organization.) Yet, if it was a bunch with guns and drums and flags but NOT in the same color clothing, and WITH their families, the response was probably to meet them at the dock with a lot of unsold inventory with “SALE” written all over them. Oh, and real estate guides… lots of real estate guides.

And after they were here for five or six years, hadn’t gotten in (too much) trouble, and had a farm or a ranch or a shop, they could wander down to a justice of the peace and sign up as a naturalized citizen. And get to vote (if they weren’t already), and pay taxes (ditto), and complain about all the newcomers (double ditto). Pretty neat.

What happened? Or rather, why? Why do people who want to come to the USofA today have to get eleventy-seven vaccinations, green card, blood tests, urine tests, go through fifty forms, half-dozen interviews, and pay out the nose? If they like it here and want to become an American, they have to wait a long time, apply, take tests, have references, more forms, and all that fooforaw.

Well, it didn’t happen all at once, no indeed. It took years. First were customs offices at the ports. And then, a few fences here and there. Then immigration stations, at least at the big ports. And Border Patrol stations. (But if you didn’t want to lose time, you turned off the main road and went on the gravel by Joe’s, then turned north to Weyburn in time for the movie. After the movie, you drove back on the main road because the station closed at 9 PM, but nobody closed the road.) If you were my grandparents back from a 1918 honeymoon in Nuevo Laredo, and the silly man at the little office on the US end of the bridge thought Pappy was trying to bring back a little Mex fluff, Nana didn’t whip out her driver’s license (what’s that?) or a birth certificate; her cultured Texan accent and a few choice words convinced the guy that a dark tan and a serape against the wind in a Model T didn’t make one an “alien.” In the sixties, my family took trips into “Old Mexico” and “the Dominion” about as often as we drove from Montana to North Dakota, or Colorado to Texas. The border stations, even then, bothered the causal traveler about as much as the weigh stations (ports-of-entry) going from one state to another. But then came “papers, please.” Drivers licenses and birth certificates and car registrations and “do you have anything to declare,” and barbed wire, concrete walls, “pull over here please,” roadblocks on I-25 northbound, and all the garbage that we have today.

Why? What changed? As discussed in earlier articles, the type of immigrants (and visitors) to this country really haven’t changed much, except as our growing restrictions have forced changes. Rather, it is our perception, attitude, and restrictions that have changed.

Why? We have increasingly “taken counsel of our fears.” That is, greed and tribalism. Greed is “economic fear.” Common today, I like to call it what it is: we’ve become stupidly selfish. “We have ours” and we don’t want “them” to share in it, fearing we might lose because “there isn’t (or might not be) enough to go around.” Tribalism includes such things as “racism” and “religious bigotry:” These people are “different from us” because they have different colors of skin, talk funny, have strange (and threatening) religions and/or strange (and disgusting) habits. Fear! We MUST keep our land pure, we MUST keep out the invaders! Our fears are in control. Thus we have today’s immigration mess.

In ancient, less-free societies, these fears MIGHT have some validity; in the United States of the 1800s and 1900s, they had none. In fact, it took decades of constant repetition and playing to fear to get them accepted, then used to justify the restrictions on immigration that developed over 150 years, and which we have today.

Softly, softly catchee monkee! OR, The camel’s nose.

The drumbeat of the selfishness and tribalism fears (and the laws that resulted and ended the freedom of the Union’s borders) started early on.

As these things often are, the first actions were couched in terms of morality and combating evil. Laws outlawed indentured servants and the slave trade. (Indenturing was one very common way for someone to afford the passage to the New World: they sold themselves into slavery for a fixed period, in return for the ticket.) Slaves didn’t used to be just black, and slaves didn’t always stay slaves, regardless of skin color. Slavery was and is wrong, but we cannot ignore the impact it had and has today on the cause of freedom. Opposition to the slave trade and indenturing was had a “high” moral tone, hiding the “greed” and “tribal” reasons: indentured servants and slaves were cheap competition to “native” Americans, and they usually had dark skins and talked funny.

Many other limits followed, based on these same motives. These motives were strong because of events in our history: the unique (ultimately “racially” based) American slave system, the Indian wars, European religious wars, fears of foreign domination, and government growth (“Smuggling steals from the taxpayer, right?”). Limits and bans on Asian immigration, for example, were both tribal and selfish, not just “racial.” A poor “yellow” Chinese, Japanese, or Tagalong immigrant was willing to work for much less than a bankrupt Georgia planter or Ohio farmer, whether in the gold fields or on the railroad. Both motivated limits on immigration of southern Europeans also: all those “Papists” took good jobs from WASPs. (Of course, others faced the same hurdles: “No Irish need apply” was often found on “Help Wanted” ads in the 1800s, mostly aimed at Catholics.) Later outright prohibitions on Latino and African immigration are claimed to be racial (“tribal”), but the selfish motive is there, too.

Both of these arguments from fear are fallacious. Pre-federal America was, especially by the standards of the day, already a “Heinz-57” culture. It had so many sources of blood, customs, and attitudes, that it made the British Isles (itself a significant melting pot of ethnicity) look staid by comparison. “Racial” mixing, religious diversity, even change in language, was well underway. America was a growing jumble of tribes and confederations of tribes, and splitting of tribes, and merging of tribes. (Yeah, I know, we don’t call them tribes: “clans” or “families” or “churches,” but we had lots of them!) By our very notions of liberty and freedom, of God-given rights and responsibilities, we were busy breaking down our own idea that those in “our tribe” were the only “real people” (and help start to break down that idea in the rest of the world, as well).

The economic argument was no better: in a frontier and free-market economy, there could be short-term problems, but long-term it was clear that immigration not only caused little real hurt, but was actually critical to our growth and development. Perhaps, at heart, the economic fear was also a tribal “them versus us” fear: fear that we can’t compete with the newcomers, and therefore we must limit their opportunity.

Generally, these real reasons for limiting migration (in general, from particular areas, or by particular ethnic groups) were not spoken, especially since the liberal revolution of the 1960s. So other arguments have stood in their place. But when you strip away the façade, you find these same old things: tribalism and selfishness. Most of the arguments we hear today were originally made in the late 1800s, and have taken on lives of their own.

What is the answer? Reject our fear, and remember that freedom, by its nature, is meant to be shared. Unlike the Spartans and Athenians, we can (I hope) understand that our freedom cannot be built on the slavery of others, and that is what closed borders do, ultimately. It is time to “tear down that wall” and make America once more a beacon and land of hope, freedom, and opportunity.

Open borders and immigration cannot be solved in a vacuum. It must be solved at the same time as the other issues of liberty: nanny government, do-gooder politics, equality of outcome (not opportunity), and all these other things that have eroded the American dream. Otherwise, the solution to one problem will just aggravate others. But no problem is unsolvable, and I like to think we can do it… and fear we cannot.

There are many questions that people say need to be resolved, related to immigration. But I submit that the ultimate questions HAVE been resolved, nay, PROVEN over and over.  Freedom is good; tyranny is bad, whether it is of the commercial, national, local, ethnic, racial, or any other kind.  "NO KING BUT GOD!"  Tyranny is tyranny, whether it is over what you can say, what you can believe, what you can wear, what you can eat, what you can shoot, whom you can buy from, OR where you can go.  Questions are left, such as: (1) how can we stop the growth of tyranny, and (2) how can we roll back the tyranny we have already.  In other words, the discussion is not about ends, but about means. 

In the long run, the only people who benefit from tyranny are the immoral, who don't care what they steal, or how parasitic they are.  The more abusive a situation, a government, a nation, becomes, the more likely it is that immoral people benefit. Unfortunately, such people tend to rise to power, whether in institutions, governments, or business, and then corrupt those institutions (more), unless moral people are willing to take a stand. We can’t separate the freedom to travel from all other liberties. And that is what it’s all about.

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Free Immigration - Part 1

Communication - The Essentials of Self-Defense