Objectivism and an Immigration Policy of Self-Interest for America Today

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“The Underdeveloped, the Undeveloped, and the Not-to-be-Developed Cultures”

Objectivism and an Immigration Policy of Self-Interest for America Today

Ed Powell

Introduction

The date is December 31, 406 AD. It is so cold the Rhine has frozen over completely. In the summer, the Rhine is used a mechanism for trade between the Roman Empire on its west bank and the barbarian German tribesman on the east bank. The Rhine is also a natural barrier that serves as a border between the Romans and the barbarians. When the Rhine freezes over, an uncountable number of German migrants cross into Roman territory carrying with them everything they own. The Roman garrisons are not prepared to deal with such an influx. There are too many Germans, spread too widely, for the legions to have any effective response. The Germans ravage through Gaul, killing the Romanized elites and enslaving the citizenry. Britain, now cut off from the Empire, is abandoned and left to fight alone. Crossing the Pyrenees, barbarians descend upon the wealthy Spanish plain and despoil the peaceful civilization that took centuries to create. Not satisfied with their plunder of half the Western Empire, one group of barbarians crosses into the wealthy province of Africa and so thoroughly and wantonly destroys the elements of civilization that the name of this tribe, the Vandals, is forever associated with nihilistic destruction. Another tribe, the Goths, welcomed into the Empire as friends by the Emperor in Constantinople, yet still maintaining their fundamental loyalty to their own leaders rather than their new polity, march on and sack Rome in 410 AD, the first time in 800 years the city was taken by foreign forces. The Roman Empire in the West was dead. Its final death throes take a few decades to complete, but its fate is sealed on that cold New Year’s Eve in 406. It would be more than 1300 years before Western Civilization recovered to the level it had been during the Roman Empire.

The date is December 31, 2016. History is repeating itself. Bands of barbarian migrants have invaded Europe and are ravaging its cities using terrorism and the doctrine of al-hijrah, “civilizational holy war via immigration.” Like the Romans sixteen hundred years earlier, the Europeans seem powerless to stop the migration. Powerless physically. Powerless intellectually. Thousands of women are sexually assaulted. Sweden has become the rape capital of Europe. Theaters are shot up by migrants. Bombs are detonated in public places. Trucks are used as weapons of war to indiscriminately kill shoppers and pedestrians. In the United States, things are hardly better, with attacks in shopping malls, nightclubs, businesses, and in the streets. Large areas of cities are given over to migrant gangs and gang warfare between different ethnic criminals has made large areas of the American Southwest “no-go zones.” Wealthy Americans retreat to gated communities where fences, walls, and guards prevent the entrance of anyone who might be a risk. Non-wealthy Americans are left, like the Britons in 406 AD, to fend for themselves.

The lights are indeed going out in the West[1] and no one seems to know what can be done. What is needed is a philosophy of reason, which can look at mass immigration in its historic context, analyze every aspect of the problem, look at earlier migrations and both their causes and effects, and suggest philosophical defenses for Western Civilization. There is such a philosophy, Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand. But its current leading advocates are almost universally on the side of the invading barbarians. This essay is intended to look at the issue of migration from a more comprehensive perspective, drawing on history, philosophy, economics, and politics to form a more principled defense of Western Civilization, based on Ayn Rand’s philosophy, that her most prominent advocates seem unable or unwilling to do. I will show that the only method of saving Western Civilization from the savages invading it is by restricting immigration to only those individuals likely to be compatible with the values that undergird it, and to expel those immigrants who by their advocacy and actions serve only to undermine the freedom of the United States in particular and Western Civilization as a whole. We have seen this story before. It does not end well. I not only do not want it to happen again, but I’ll be damned if I’ll sit back and watch people who claim to be advocates of Ayn Rand’s philosophy cheer for the barbarian invasion on principle without pointing out their rationalistic arguments and the suicidal effects for the West if their policies are adopted.

Immigration

Immigration has been crucial to the success of the United States, both economically and culturally. Immigrants worked on America’s farms and in its factories, started some of America’s most productive businesses, fought in many of American’s wars, and contributed to its literature, science, economics, sports, entertainment, and fine arts. Individual immigrants have made enormous contributions to America, and continued immigration to the United States is crucial to its continued success as a country.

However, America’s experience with immigration is not all wine and roses. Many advocates of unrestricted immigration (“open immigration” or “open borders”) fall into the intellectual trap of selection bias, remembering only the good immigrants (e.g., Andrew Carnegie or Ayn Rand) while forgetting or ignoring all of the criminals, terrorists, and bums; ignoring all the evil philosophy and cultural practices that have been imported into the United States along with some productive immigrants. Prominent Objectivists point to the open immigration policies of the United States in the Nineteenth Century along with the coincident tremendous economic growth, and in massive exercise in post hoc ergo propter hoc, proudly assert that the United States would be much better off with those same open immigration policies today. Yet in this advocacy, not only are they committing a fairly obvious logical fallacy, they are ignoring both the actual history of immigration into the United States and the numbers, timetables, and social mechanisms that were responsible for these immigrants becoming assimilated as Americans. In essence, they proudly assert their desire to remain entirely ignorant of the facts about American immigration, and thus jettison any hope of learning from history, of making better decisions than our forebears, of placing today’s immigration debate squarely in the proper historical context, and thus abandon any hope of formulating proper inductive principles on the topic.

Objectivism and Immigration

The Objectivist community (such as it is) is as divided on this issue as on no other issue, with the most prominent and vocal open immigration proponents accusing those of us on the other side of every known moral fault, including the most prominent weapon in the entire verbal arsenal of the Regressive Left, calling us racists.[2] Notwithstanding the view that those Objectivists with a principled opposition to open immigration are racists, a debate has been scheduled on Amy Peikoff’s radio show,[3] between ARI Executive Co-Chairman and President Yaron Brook and New Zealand author Lindsay Perigo. This essay is created in anticipation of that debate.

The number of prominent open immigration Objectivists is too large to survey, though it is instructive to look at a few. Harry Binswanger is the most prominent Objectivist advocating completely open borders.

…entry into the U.S. would be unrestricted, unregulated, and unscreened, exactly as is entry into Connecticut from New York. The crucial point is often overlooked: in its efforts to capture or bar criminals, the government may not violate the rights of the innocent. That means, no detention at borders, no demand to produce ‘papers’ or ‘passports,’— such procedures violate the rights of the innocent. In order to interfere with a man’s free movement, the state needs to show ‘probable cause’—which means specific evidence against the specific individual, not the indiscriminate subjection of everyone to a screening process. There is no more authority to demand papers at the border than there is for the police to board a city bus and demand papers of everyone on it. A man, citizen or non-citizen, is to be presumed innocent. He does not have to satisfy the government that he is not a criminal, in the absence of any evidence that he is.”[4]

The principle of individual rights demands open immigration. Implementing that would mean phasing out all limitations on immigration. Entry into the United States should ultimately be free for any foreigner, absent objective evidence of criminal intent or infectious disease.[5]

It is very important to read the entire HBL “Open Immigration” article by Binswanger, as he is the most clear-thinking and consistent open borders Objectivist on this topic.[6] He doesn’t waffle. He doesn’t change positions from one week to the next. He stakes out a clear, logically consistent, unequivocal position, a position that can be intellectually engaged by people like myself who disagree.

Other prominent Objectivists who support open immigration are:[7]

Former Ayn Rand Institute (ARI) employee and journalist Robert Tracinski: “Any restrictions on immigration – large or small – trample the rights of both employers and job-seeking immigrants.”[8]

Publisher of The Objective Standard, Craig Biddle: “The principle of individual rights … mandates open immigration.”[9]

Author and philosopher Andrew Bernstein: “Open immigration is both morally right and economically beneficial. … If we let enough [immigrants] in, perhaps their number will offset the growing number of the native born who simper that America is the land of entitlement.”[10] And, “… open immigration is, for contemporary America, the only policy that is both moral and practical.”[11]

Thomas Duke, writing in the ARI-sanctioned publication for college students, The Undercurrent, “dismantle the entire bureaucracy of immigration restrictions. Open the doors. Let them in.”[12]

The most difficult of prominent Objectivists on this topic is Yaron Brook. Brook has never written anything about immigration, but he has addressed the issue in a number of lectures and on his podcast. In a YouTube lecture from May 17, 2008[13], Brook comes down strongly on the side of open borders, pinning his argument on economic rights:

Well I believe in open immigration. I believe people should be allowed into this country, openly with a few exceptions …. I believe that, because we as Americans have a right, an inalienable right, to hire whoever we want to hire, for example. It is none of anybody’s business, not my neighbor’s, and not the federal government’s, and not the state government’s, whether I choose to hire somebody from Connecticut, or from Mexico, or from Thailand. It’s me pursuing my business, it’s me pursuing my life, making choices about what’s good for me … . If I want to sell my house to somebody from Thailand, if I want to sell … it’s my business, nobody else’s. … If I want to rent a hotel room to … … it is Americans’ right to deal with whoever they want to deal with, as individuals. Each one of us has a right to deal with Mexicans, to deal with Thais, to deal with Chinese, to deal with Scandinavians, to deal with Israelis, to deal with people who live in Connecticut, strange as that might seem. That’s what individual rights means; it means that you have a right to do what you want to do as long as you’re not infringing on other people, as long as you’re not using force on other people. … the basic right here that needs to be protected is the right of Americans to do business with whoever they want. And therefore I believe that our borders should be open.” Three classes of people I think should be excluded … Terrorists, or any kind of threat to national security, people who have that kind of background, spies, whatever; criminals, people who are going to threaten the lives and property of American citizens …; and people who carry infectious diseases, that again are inflicting harm on Americans. And harm I mean here is physical harm, harm I mean here as violence, as force.

Leonard Peikoff, Ayn Rand’s heir, in 2013 expressed concern over immigration for two of the reasons I get into below, welfare and politics,

It happens to be the case that we are teetering on the edge of dictatorship. It happens to be the case that if the Democrats continue to have or grow their political power we will be over that edge. And it happens to be the case, whether you like it or not, that of all Hispanics in America, whether they are rich or poor, self-made men or anything else, 80% are reliably and continually Democratic. So if you are talking about a bill, I don’t care whether it’s fair/unfair in any other respects, you are talking about a bill that will infuse into this country a massive amount of Democratic supporters and thereby guarantee the destruction of this country. That is what immigration means today. And there’s no use asking me in theory what do I think, there is no theory now, we’re on the end. So it’s a question of buying time. [14]

Because of the obvious disagreement between Peikoff’s position and Brook’s position of “I believe that our borders should be open,” a debate of sorts was scheduled between Peikoff and Brook on Peikoff’s podcast, where Peikoff begins strong, countering Brook’s economic rights argument by saying, “They [employers] do not have a right to do something that is objectively harmful to the country and to all of us.” But he ends weakly, essentially capitulating to Brook, “I’ll concede the point. … if it’s [sic, “they’re”] not an imminent threat by bolstering significantly a destructive party then it [i.e., Peikoff’s position on immigration restriction] doesn’t apply.”[15] Peikoff was convinced by Brook and more-or-less reverted to a position of open immigration in principle, even if there may be immediate negative practical consequences.

Brook went wild on his BlogTalk radio show in early March 2015,[16] complaining about the Republicans’ (as usual ineffectual) attempt to defund President Obama’s executive amnesty:

This is, this is the issue of the day? This is the most important thing? What is the issue here? Is it that you hate immigration, and that you would do anything to stop allowing four million people who work in the United States today, who have got jobs in the United States today, from becoming, from gaining legality? You wanna keep them in the shadows? My gardener who does a phenomenal job? That’s the most urgent issue of the day, is God forbid we should allow people who are already in the country, who are already working, from actually getting a work permit.

Brook’s phenomenal gardener was the standard on which American immigration policy should be defined.

Yet everything changed in the Fall of 2015, as Muslim migrants flooded into Europe, bringing with them jihad, terrorism, crime, sexual assault, and welfare mooching to the heart of Western Civilization. As the migrant crisis raged in Europe at the end of 2015, Brook changed his position radically[17]:

But more importantly [an proper government] would basically ban the immigration of Muslims into the country, basically as an act of self-defense, and in particular in Europe where terrorism attacks [are committed] by Muslims who are not coming in from the outside but either have lived in the West for many years or grown up in the West and where radical mosques exist. I think the burden of proof has to be on anybody coming in to try to prove that they are moderates, that they are truly not at risk of becoming radicals and becoming a threat to Europe. So point one is we’re at war and the West is at war, and Europe is at war, and the biggest problem Europe has, and the biggest problem the United States has in this context, is we won’t declare war and we won’t identify the enemy and therefore we can’t even figure out who’s okay and who’s not, who it’s okay to let into your country, and who’s not okay to let into your country, who you could monitor and who you should monitor, so we first, if we’re going to have any kind of rational immigration policy in this regard, we should first define who the enemy is and be willing to act against that and be willing to discriminate against that enemy in the sense of not letting them into the country.

No longer is he talking of the rights of employers or workers, landlords or tenants. He is talking about national self defense. Yet he gives no details on the philosophical basis for the change. He in fact does not even admit a change has occurred. And unfortunately, since he has never written anything systematic on the issue (unlike Binswanger), this radical change has gone unnoticed by the great mass of Objectivists who still take him at his word from the 2008 lecture. After all, “I believe that our borders should be open,” could not be stated more clearly. Brook has recently taken to Twitter[18] to claim those of us labeling him as an advocate of open borders are lying, simply because we have not kept up on whether Brook and ARI are fighting Eurasia or Eastasia.[19] “To exist is to possess identity. … They keep telling you what it is not, but never tell you what it is.”[20] Brook keeps telling us what his position on immigration is not, not what it is.

In Brook’s podcast episode referenced in the Twitter stream, Brook bases his opposition to Muslim immigration not just on the issue of jihad, but on increased crime, increased welfare usage, and the impossibility of assimilation for the Muslim migrants. In other words, he echoes many of my arguments below. He blames American foreign policy (not unjustly, but for different reasons than I do) for creating the crisis, and notes that Europe has no cultural confidence. Brook is correct on this last, as there is no “European culture,” just French culture, German culture, Italian culture, British culture, etc. While Brook bemoaned the vote for Brexit in June 2016[21] as a step backwards from the “European Project,” he now urges Britain to leave the EU as soon as possible, fearing the rise of Nazi-like parties in European nations. He ends his talk by saying, “I am a pro-immigration guy, but not on the terms that you are required to sacrifice for the immigrants. Not on the terms that the immigrants are coming in dedicated—a certain percentage of them—dedicated to your destruction. They are jihadis, and you can’t tell the difference between them.”

Note that Brook doesn’t advocate extra screening of Muslims, he advocates a complete ban on all of them, even while admitting that a majority of them are peaceful. He expresses no concern over this “collective judgment” against an entire class of people, and no concern for all of the “economic rights” of potential European employers of Muslims or the Muslims themselves. In other words, he sounds exactly like me and similar Objectivists who advocate selective immigration, or even like President Trump, but with apparently no self-awareness of the cognitive dissonance his shifting of position has engendered in sincere students of Objectivism looking to ARI for philosophical guidance, not to mention the frank dishonesty of accusing people like us of lying about his position when it has changed so radically and so recently. It is perfectly reasonable for a person to say, “I was wrong. When I advocated open immigration in the past, I had not considered all the facts. After seeing what the policies I had long advocated have actually resulted in reality, I now believe immigration policy should be set based on a country’s national self-interest and self-defense needs.”[22] Yet no such mea culpa has been forthcoming from Brook, nor is there any indication that Brook even understands that such a dramatic shift in his position has occurred. Nor has he generalized this position beyond Muslims. It is true that Muslims are, on average, the worst possible immigrants to Western countries, because of the deep entanglement of Islamic Supremacism[23] with Islam the personal religion, but other Third World immigrants have similar issues in kind, if not quite to the same degree. And there are plenty of Muslims who have made good Americans, for example, many wealthy Westernized Iranians who fled Iran when the Shah was overthrown by the mullahs. How would a “ban” on Muslims affect them? How would it affect a heroic person like Ayaan Hirsi Ali? Brook gives no answers to these questions.

I find myself in the interesting position of holding views on what the proper immigration policy should be in a free country between those of Yaron Brook I (from 2008-2013, advocating completely open immigration) and those of Yaron Brook II (from November 2015 to the present, advocating restrictive immigration based on a country’s self-defense needs and no Muslim immigration at all). How in the world is anyone going to debate Brook on this topic? Which position is he going to espouse? Or will it be a hybrid position, essentially open borders for everyone except for Muslims? Or will it shift from one proposition to the next depending on the statement of his debater? How can anyone tell in advance? I do not think delving further into Brook’s conflicting statements will yield promising results. It’s certainly possible he has made statements supporting immigration restrictions before the Fall of 2015, or pro-open borders statements after. His position changes slightly or radically each week, and a detailed description of such intellectual Brownian motion is not the purpose of this essay.

What then about Ayn Rand? Unfortunately, Ayn Rand herself never wrote anything about the philosophic or historical principles behind immigration restrictions, though she was an immigrant to the United States during the most restrictionist immigration period in American history. At a talk in Boston at the Ford Hall Forum in 1973,[24] in answer to a question, Rand spoke out against “clos[ing] the border” and “forbid[ing] immigration.” She ended by saying, “How could I ever advocate that immigration should be restricted when I wouldn’t be alive today if it were?”[25] I personally have no objection to Rand’s statements because of three basic facts:

I am not against immigration as such, nor do I want to forbid immigration or “close” the border, as I described in the previous section.

Rand came to the United States under a regime of the most comprehensive restrictions on immigration the United States has ever had, in 1926, two years after the passage of “Immigration Act of 1924.” No one I know of in the Objectivist community wishes to restrict immigration as severely or as arbitrarily as this law did, yet Ayn Rand immigrated legally then nevertheless.

Today’s context, in which immigration is primarily from the Third World and Muslim countries, is overwhelmingly different from the period of Rand’s initial residency in the United States. The repeal of the 1924 Immigration Act was fully accomplished in 1968, only five years before Rand’s off-the-cuff statements in Boston, and before the effects of the repeal could be fully experienced by her. Rand was first-handed about every issue, but she was not fully educated about every single issue in American history.

In other contexts, we see that Rand was no fan of the savages of the Third World. She wrote,[26]

“Why is Western civilization admonished to admire primitive cultures? Because they are not admirable. Why is a primitive man exhorted to ignore Western achievements? Because they are. Why is the self-expression of a retarded adolescent to be nurtured and acclaimed? Because he has nothing to express. Why is the self-expression of a genius to be impeded and ignored? Because he has. “It is to the Mohammedans, the Buddhists, and the cannibals; to the underdeveloped, the undeveloped, and the not-to-be-developed cultures that the Capitalist United States of America is asked to apologize for her skyscrapers, her automobiles, her plumbing, and her smiling, confident, untortured, un-skinned-alive, un-eaten young men! … It is not for her flaws that the United States of America is hated, but for her virtues; not for her weaknesses, but for her achievements; not for her failures, but for her success; her magnificent, shining, life-giving success. (“The Obliteration of Capitalism,” The Objectivist Newsletter, October 1965.) [Emphasis mine.]

On what basis would anyone believe Rand would have approved of bringing “the Mohammedans, the Buddhists, and the cannibals” from the “underdeveloped, the undeveloped, and the not-to-be-developed cultures” into the United States in the hundreds of thousands or millions?

Similarly, answering a question about the treatment of American Indians, Rand was indignant about the right of the United States to exist as a free country[27]:

“Now, I don’t care to discuss the alleged complaints American Indians have against this country. I believe, with good reason, the most unsympathetic Hollywood portrayal of Indians and what they did to the white man. They had no right to a country merely because they were born here and then acted like savages. The white man did not conquer this country. And you’re a racist if you object, because it means you believe that certain men are entitled to something because of their race. You believe that if someone is born in a magnificent country and doesn’t know what to do with it, he still has a property right to it. He does not. Since the Indians did not have the concept of property or property rights—they didn’t have a settled society, they had predominantly nomadic tribal ‘cultures’—they didn’t have rights to the land, and there was no reason for anyone to grant them rights that they had not conceived of and were not using. It’s wrong to attack a country that respects (or even tries to respect) individual rights. If you do, you’re an aggressor and are morally wrong. But if a ‘country’ does not protect rights—if a group of tribesmen are the slaves of their tribal chief—why should you respect the ‘rights’ that they don’t have or respect? The same is true for a dictatorship. The citizens in it have individual rights, but the country has no rights and so anyone has the right to invade it, because rights are not recognized in that country; and no individual or country can have its cake and eat it too—that is, you can’t claim one should respect the ‘rights’ of Indians, when they had no concept of rights and no respect for rights. But let’s suppose they were all beautifully innocent savages—which they certainly were not. What were they fighting for, in opposing the white man on this continent? For their wish to continue a primitive existence; for their ‘right’ to keep part of the earth untouched—to keep everybody out so they could live like animals or cavemen. Any European who brought with him an element of civilization had the right to take over this continent, and it’s great that some of them did. The racist Indians today—those who condemn America—do not respect individual rights.”

I simply can’t imagine the Ayn Rand who so thoroughly demolished the idea that savages who were already here in the territory of the United States have inalienable rights to continue their savagery would, in the same breath, advocate (like Harry Binswanger, Craig Biddle, Robert Tracinski, and Yaron Brook), the wholesale importation of the same sort of savages from abroad under the rubric of “the right to immigrate,” or “the right to contract.” Indeed, the American Indians Rand spoke so eloquently about above were in some ways more civilized than the Third World immigrants of today—they only took scalps, not whole heads.

Some Sanity

There are a number of Objectivists other than myself writing on the subject of immigration and taking the selective immigration position, including novelist Ed Cline[28], attorney Ed Mazlish[29], and author Ron Pisaturo[30]. Cline focuses on the political and criminal elements with regard to massive Third World immigration, while Mazlish focuses on the need for ideological screening of would-be immigrants. Mazlish points out that bringing the principles of a free society to Afghanistan and Iraq did not turn any of these peoples into Jeffersonian democrats, and wonders why we could possibly imagine that bringing those same people to America would do so. “There is no evidence that bringing the savages to the US Constitution can work any better than bringing the US Constitution to the savages.”[31] Pisaturo details his change of mind on the topic of open immigration and discusses the philosophical presumptions behind a rational immigration policy. I wholeheartedly agree with their writings, and I urge any of my readers to read their pieces before continuing with this essay.

The Crux of the Issue

Despite all the words written and spoken by Objectivists on this issue, only one person has gotten to the crux of the issue, Harry Binswanger:

Freedom of travel is a right. It is a right possessed by every human being, not just by Americans. The Mexican government or the French government has no right to stop you from entering Mexico or France, and our government has no right to stop a Mexican or Frenchman from entering America. [32] The border between the U.S. and Mexico (and between the U.S. and Canada) should be exactly like the border between Connecticut and Massachusetts: you see ‘Welcome to Massachusetts’ and otherwise you are unaware of the difference.[33]

Simplifying the language as much as possible, the crucial question, the crux of the issue, is:

Does an individual have the right to cross an international border?

Everything else is window dressing. If the individual does have that right, then Binswanger is correct and international borders would be no different than state, county, or city borders, with “Welcome” signs and a different administrative structure for enforcing the law. If you believe Binswanger is wrong, and there is no right to cross an international border without permission, then you and I have no fundamental difference in principle; we are merely arguing over what type of immigration restrictions are best for any country in general or the United States in particular.

Let’s look at Binswanger’s right to travel idea in detail. A right is defined by Ayn Rand[34] as:

A “right” is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context. There is only one fundamental right (all the others are its consequences or corollaries): a man’s right to his own life. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action; the right to life means the right to engage in self-sustaining and self-generated action—which means: the freedom to take all the actions required by the nature of a rational being for the support, the furtherance, the fulfillment and the enjoyment of his own life.

In short, a “right” is something a person may do without asking anyone’s permission. In the context of immigration, if Binswanger is correct, then a “right to travel” means no border checkpoints, no passports, no limitations on whether a person is a criminal, a member of a terrorist group, or a carrier of smallpox. Any limitation on that person’s right to travel must be supported by a finding of probable cause by a judge based on an objective presentation of evidence by a policeman. That’s what a “right to travel” actually means.

Lest you believe the right to travel means no border checkpoints solely for individuals crossing borders on foot or in automobiles, let me remind you that this is not the case. A right means no restrictions at all on an activity, no matter what the mechanism. The right to a free press applies whether the “press” in question is a printing press that Benjamin Franklin would have recognized, or a radio signal, a TV signal, or the internet. The “right to travel” is exactly analogous.

The United States and Canada jointly maintain what are called “Air Defense Identification Zones” (ADIZs) around all of North American airspace. The ADIZ is manned by “border guards” working for the US Air Force. All aircraft that enter an ADIZ must have permission from the US government to do so. A flight plan must be filed and permission granted before any aircraft can breach an ADIZ. If an aircraft does enter an ADIZ with no flight plan or approval from the US government, an Air National Guard or US Air Force fighter/interceptor will be launched to intercept the aircraft, identify it, communicate with it regarding its intentions, and prevent it (using deadly force if necessary) from entering US airspace. A similar situation exists regarding ships on the high seas. Radar stations and satellites identify each ship coming toward the United States and any unidentified ship without permission coming into US waters will be intercepted by the Coast Guard by aircraft or cutters. Both the ADIZ and the sea interdiction process have been set up as measures of national self-defense by the United States and Canada.

None of these defensive measures are justified under Binswanger’s right to travel. A right to enter the United States is a right, no matter whether the person entering is doing so on foot, in an automobile, in a truck, in a ship, in a submarine, or in an aircraft. Rights are rights, and don’t magically disappear because the technological method used exercising those rights changes.

But, I hear the objections, aircraft can be dangerous! Remember 9/11 and the 2006 transatlantic aircraft plot![35] “Tough,” I would say if I agreed with Binswanger, “a right is a right is a right is a right is a right is a right is a right is a right, and cannot be killed or swept aside!”[36] Unless there was demonstrable, provable-in-court evidence that a particular individual on a particular vehicle was an immediate threat, nothing can be done. That’s the actual meaning in reality of the statement: “The border between the U.S. and Mexico (and between the U.S. and Canada) should be exactly like the border between Connecticut and Massachusetts: you see ‘Welcome to Massachusetts’ and otherwise you are unaware of the difference.” Binswanger’s “right to travel” means no border guards on land, no border guards at sea, no border guards in the air, and no border guards in space.[37]

However, Binswanger’s “right to travel” (or Brook’s “right to hire or rent”) is not a primary. One must go through a long chain of reasoning to get to such a statement. For example, one might use the following deductive process, where each statement builds upon the last as if a giant mechanical crank of logic was turning:

Every individual has a right to life (See Rand’s quote above).

He has a right to “take all the actions required by the nature of a rational being for the support… his life”. (Ditto).

Productive work is required to support life. (Obvious.)

Sometimes work requires travel. (Also obvious.)

Thus travel is a right, no matter where the travel starting points and destination are. ( <== Serious mistake made here.)

Thus, there is a right to travel across international borders.

The problem is that in this chain of reasoning, the context has been dropped repeatedly throughout the argument. It completely ignores what countries are, what the world political context is, and what facts of reality give rise to the border between Massachusetts and Connecticut on the one hand and the United States and Mexico (or any other two countries) on the other hand. This chain of reasoning is an example of rationalism, the use of deductive logic detached from reality.[38]

When these contextual factors are included in one’s reasoning, the conclusion is inescapable: there is no such right to cross an international border.

Explaining why is complicated. In the explanation, I hope to explicate not only why no such right exists, but also under what circumstances immigration should be permitted, both in the United States and in other countries around the world.

What is a Country?

A country is an independent political unit not under the control of any other political unit. A country must be distinguished from a “nation”[39], a “state”[40], or a “nation-state”[41] for this discussion. There are roughly 200 countries on Earth in 2017. These countries exist in a state of mutual “anarchy” with each other, relying on mutual agreements enforced by common consent. There is no global government that holds a global monopoly on the use of force or the exclusive power to enforce social rules.[42] The primary purpose of a country’s government is to defend that country against foreign interference. This interference might be naked aggression such as a missile strike or an invasion; it could be selective aggression against individuals or businesses either at home or abroad; it could be interference in some way with the country’s political process; or it could consist of a long-term strategy to undermine the country as a viable free independent political unit.

Countries deal with other countries as units. This is not “collectivism,” but an expression of the reality of international politics. When Japanese aircraft bombed Pearl Harbor, the United States didn’t put out international arrest warrants for Admiral Yamamoto and his pilots, it declared war against the entire country of Japan, including those tens of millions of Japanese citizens that neither wanted war with the United States nor were even aware of any of the controversies that led to war. Long-standing law and custom provide for the internment of enemy aliens during wartime, despite their guilt or innocence, and consultation with foreign governments when one of their citizens is accused of committing a crime inside the United States. The reason for these laws and customs is that in international affairs, each government is considered (partially or potentially) responsible for the actions of its citizens abroad. Recent administrations have reversed this long-standing custom, in that now economic sanctions are sometimes targeted at individuals rather than whole countries. For example, in response to the Russian invasion of the Crimea, instead of imposing sanctions on the Russian government or Russia as a whole, the United States has imposed sanctions on certain select Russian businesses and individuals.[43] Given the fungibility of money and the widespread use of shell companies and subsidiaries, such “sanctions” are, for the most part, a joke, and are done as a mechanism of “virtue signaling,”[44] not as a serious exercise in foreign policy. However, this type of unserious approach to international relations is the endpoint of the theory seemingly espoused by people like Binswanger[45] that foreign individuals must be treated in all cases like individuals, not as citizens of a foreign country.

Subversion

Many Objectivists fall into the fallacy of the excluded middle by saying that anything other than a missile strike or invasion cannot constitute “aggression” and must therefore be considered “peace.” This is not true either historically or logically. One would think that after the United States fought a 45-year-long Cold War in which the weapons of the enemy were infiltration, espionage, and subversion of America’s institutions, rather than outright warfare, that the idea that only flying bullets constitute aggression has been somewhat discredited, but this seems not to be the case.

This type of subversion can occur through the culture as well. Politics is downstream of culture.[46] If you want a free polity, you must maintain a culture of freedom. Any individual who comes to the United States might not believe they are here to undermine a culture of liberty, but that lack of self-awareness doesn’t change the fact that for many immigrants, that’s exactly what they are doing here.

The most explicit network of subversives in the United States are run by the Muslim Brotherhood. While the Muslim Brotherhood receives occasional condemnation for its support of its terrorist affiliate in Gaza (Hamas), the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States is not primarily a terrorist organization, but a Muslim Supremacist organization engaging in what they call al-hijrah, “civilizational jihad [holy war]”. In the investigation surrounding the funding of overseas terrorists by the Muslim Brotherhood front group “The Holy Land Foundation,” a trove of documents comprising the entire history and strategy of the Muslim Brotherhood in America was discovered at the house of a Muslim Brother in Annandale, Virginia. Paul Sperry details the findings in Muslim Mafia:

One secret document found during the raid of [Muslim Brotherhood leader Ismail] Elbarasse’s home lays bare the Brotherhood’s ambitious plans for a U.S. takeover, replacing the Constitution with Shariah, or Islamic law. Written by a U.S. Brotherhood boss, Mohammed Akram Adlouni, the strategy paper describes the group’s long-term goal of destroying the U.S. system “from within” by using its freedoms and political processes against it. It is a blueprint for stealth jihad. Under the heading: “The role of the Muslim Brother in North America,” it states: The Ikhwan [Muslim Brotherhood] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within, and “sabotaging” its miserable house by the hands of the believers, so that it is eliminated and Allah’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.[47]

Dozens of Muslim Brotherhood affiliates are listed in the book, Muslim Mafia, each funded by foreign governments (mostly Saudi Arabia), foreign individuals, and American Muslims, and Leftists. Note that while the Muslim Brotherhood does collect money to fund terrorism abroad, their mission is not to commit terrorism here in the United States immediately, but to quietly amass forces in the US by immigration and cultural influence. Then the Muslim Brotherhood will be in a position to overwhelm the US culturally, legally, and democratically, before engaging in explicit violence. The nomintion of former Nation of Islam member and associate of the Muslim Brotherhood front group CAIR Keith Ellison (aka Keith Hakim, Keith X Ellison, and Keith Ellison-Muhammad)[48] to be the head of the Democratic National Committee is a major victory for both identity politics and civilizational jihad in the United States.

While Islam is the worst practitioner of this type of “civilizational jihad,” it is not the only practitioner. The Soviet Union engaged in this type of subversion in the United States, and even placed one of its agents at the right hand of the US president.[49] Mexico and its proponents in the United States are engaged in a similar longstanding and subtle policy of civilizational jihad, termed “La Reconquista,”[50] against the former Mexican territories in the Southwest United States.

Charles Truxillo, a Chicano studies professor at the University of New Mexico, for example, promises that some day we will all be part of a new sovereign Hispanic nation called “Republica del Norte” encompassing the entire Southwest. “An inevitability,” Truxillo calls it, and it will obtain its sovereignty, he warns, “by any means necessary” as “our birthright.” [51]

Like Saudi Arabia and the Muslim brotherhood, the Mexican government and some of the richest individuals in Mexico[52] funnel money to the Leftist Reconquista groups in the United States for the purpose of keeping the border open until enough Mexicans arrive that they can peacefully return the Southwest to Mexican control or declare an independent “Republica Del Norte”. This strategy, like the one practiced by the Muslim Brotherhood, is a very long-term strategy. It is not intended to “work” this year or this decade, but eventually.

Both the Mexican establishment and the Muslim Brotherhood have long-term goals adversarial to the interests of the United States, and a policy of slowly achieving those political/military goals primarily through immigration and cultural change.

A Foreign Policy of Self-Interest

The primary mechanism created by countries as their means of self-defense is a defended border. The border implements a country’s foreign policy with regards to foreigners desiring entry. Like any element of a country’s foreign policy, the principle upon which a country’s border policy rests is a policy of rational, long-term self-interest, as described by Peter Schwartz in his book The Foreign Policy of Self-Interest: [53]

[A foreign policy based on self-interest]… is a foreign policy that views the protection of Americans against international threats as its all-encompassing goal. The advocates of such a policy would reject any duty to sacrifice the wealth and the lives of Americans to the needs of other nations. And they would not seek the approval of other countries before deciding to use force to guard America’s interests. Under such a foreign policy, Washington would not attempt to defend America in fits and starts, futilely trying to straddle the two roads of self-interest and self-sacrifice, attacking one terror-sponsor today while mollifying others the next day. Nor would it attempt to uphold self-interest as an amoral expediency—as advocated by the impractical pragmatists and their school of realpolitik. Rather, the designers of a rational foreign policy would understand that self-interest can be successfully defended only if it is embraced as a consistent, moral principle—a principle in keeping with America’s founding values. … Since the concept of self-interest pertains fundamentally to the individual, the idea of a nation’s self-interest refers only to the political precondition of a person’s living rationally in a social setting, which means: freedom. Without freedom, man cannot pursue the values his life demands. Just as in ethics it is maintaining his own life that should be the individual’s ultimate purpose, in politics it is maintaining its own citizens’ liberty that should be the government’s ultimate purpose. Not the pragmatic, amoral goal of preserving a “balance of power” or of establishing “spheres of influence”—but the moral goal of keeping Americans free. Freedom is the end to which all other political actions are the means. This is the standard by which a nation’s interests ought to be measured—and this is where the science of foreign policy should begin. [Emphases mine.]

Since a country’s border is the primary mechanism for ensuring its self-defense, and a country’s self defense requires a foreign policy of self-interest, and that self-interest (as explained by Schwartz) is defined as pursuing the “moral goal of keeping Americans free,” then it stands to reason that the principle on which a country decides whether to allow any individual to cross its border is just that: an individual may cross an international border if that individual’s entrance into the country in question will serve the moral goal of keeping the country free. If the person desiring entrance will not further the goal of keeping the country free, then that person can be properly excluded. The person need not be riding in a battle tank or carrying a rifle to be properly evaluated as a threat to freedom. He may simply be a person from an incompatible culture.

Given that both individuals and governments must act in an arena of imperfect and incomplete information, the question arises about how to decide about any given individual who desires entry. This question is decided like all questions of fact, the burden of proof is on the person making the assertion, in this case the person desiring entry. That person is in effect asserting, “I wish to come into your country for a particular purpose (e.g., vacation, business, permanent residence). I will not be a threat to the lives, property, or freedom of your citizens. Let me in.” The only proper response to any such assertion is, “Okay, prove it.” This leads to the second principle that governs crossing an international border: the burden of proof on whether a potential entrant to a country is not a threat to the freedom of the citizens of that country lies entirely with the potential entrant.[54]

The mechanism for providing such a proof will be discussed below.

The Four Fundamental Objections to Open Borders and Open Immigration

While the principles above are general and apply to all countries, I now want to focus on the United States. The United States is said to be “a nation of immigrants,” which had a more-or-less open immigration policy in the nineteenth century (though not without problems, as we will see), and we’re told requires continued immigration to keep its economic vibrancy in the twenty-first century. So even given the principles elucidated above (there is no right to enter, entrance must serve the moral goal of keeping the US free, and the burden of proof should be on the immigrant) perhaps the United States should have an immigration policy that accepts almost everyone, excluding only those few who do not pass a very low bar (e.g., being a known criminal or terrorist). Unfortunately, there are four major problems that prevent such an approach from being successful,[55] welfare, politics, culture, and crime.

Welfare

First, an open borders policy is incompatible with the welfare state. The Center for Immigration Studies documents the following, based on Census Bureau data:[56]

In 2012, 51 percent of households headed by an immigrant (legal or illegal) reported that they used at least one welfare program during the year, compared to 30 percent of native households. Welfare in this study includes Medicaid and cash, food, and housing programs.

Welfare use is high for both new arrivals and well-established immigrants. Of households headed by immigrants who have been in the country for more than two decades, 48 percent access welfare.

Welfare use varies among immigrant groups. Households headed by immigrants from Central America and Mexico (73 percent), the Caribbean (51 percent), and Africa (48 percent) have the highest overall welfare use. Those from East Asia (32 percent), Europe (26 percent), and South Asia (17 percent) have the lowest.

Many immigrants struggle to support their children, and a large share of welfare is received on behalf of U.S.-born children. However, even immigrant households without children have significantly higher welfare use than native households without children—30 percent vs. 20 percent.

The large share of immigrants with low levels of education and resulting low incomes partly explains their high use rates. In 2012, 76 percent of households headed by an immigrant who had not graduated high school used one or more welfare programs, as did 63 percent of households headed by an immigrant with only a high school education.

The high rates of immigrant welfare use are not entirely explained by their lower education levels. Households headed by college-educated immigrants have significantly higher welfare use than households headed by college-educated natives—26 percent vs. 13 percent.

In the four top immigrant-receiving states, use of welfare by immigrant households is significantly higher than that of native households: California (55 percent vs. 30 percent), New York (59 percent vs. 33 percent), Texas (57 percent vs. 34 percent), and Florida (42 percent vs. 28 percent).

Most new legal immigrants are barred from welfare programs when they first arrive, and illegal immigrants are barred as well. But the ban applies to only some programs; most legal immigrants have been in the country long enough to qualify for at least some programs and the bar often does not apply to children; states often provide welfare to new immigrants on their own; naturalizing makes immigrants eligible for all programs; and, most important, immigrants (including illegal immigrants) can receive benefits on behalf of their U.S.-born children who are awarded U.S. citizenship at birth.

In addition, not only are refugees not barred from receiving welfare, they are specifically given special types of welfare handouts not available to either citizens or immigrants.[57]

The conclusion that follows from these facts is that the prerequisite for allowing more immigration (not to mention open borders) is to end the welfare state entirely. Not “end it for immigrants”—that has been tried and failed[58]—end it entirely. No selective ban on welfare for immigrants will last when up against the lawlessness of the Left. So, if you want more open immigration, my suggestion is to argue for it as a follow-on to the end of the welfare state, rather than as something that is desirable now. Advocating open immigration now, before ending the welfare state, is equivalent to advocating the destruction of the United States by national bankruptcy.

Democracy and Identity Politics

Second, open borders is incompatible with democracy. Now I know the US is not intended to be a democracy, but a rights-securing constitutional federal republic. I have news for you: it isn’t. Not today, not in fact, not in reality. I wish it were. I want it to be again. I know it used to be. But it isn’t. That’s simply a fact that you can see by looking around. One does not need a book with hundreds of footnotes to understand that the US is a representative democracy. Immigrants and their children in general block-vote in favor of socialism, for more government handouts, more government control, more government spending.[59] They do so while almost entirely evading the government rules and regulations they vote for.[60] None of our freedoms will last under a constant assault of two million pro-big-government people being imported every year, not to mention the legalization and granting the franchise to the ~15-30 million that are already here. Voter fraud committed by ineligible voters is now a significant element in some elections.[61] With open borders and amnesty for those illegal aliens now here, the would-be totalitarians of the Left will no longer even need to use voter fraud, they will get their socialist utopia for free. “One man, one vote, once,” as they say in the Third World.

If the flood of immigrants predicted when a “comprehensive immigration reform” law passes actually occurs, then the entire United States will change into California, a one-party socialist state dominated by identity politics. Identity politics means the death of constitutional government. If immigration “amnesty” passes, we have to think of what will the “right-wing” candidate will look like in 2028, when the national government is a one-party state like California is today. Do you want to have to vote for the moderately leftist “white candidate” to protect you from the depredations of the far leftist “Latino candidate” and the even more avaricious leftist “Black Lives Matter” candidate? Because that’s where the United States is going if Third World immigration isn’t sharply curtailed. The luxury of voting based on ideas is only operative when a large majority does so. When a substantial minority engages in identity politics, it’s identity politics all the way down from there. Almost all California local elections are decided in the Democratic primary where blocks of voters—white, black, Hispanic, Asian, feminist, gay—fight for their particular group candidate to represent their particular (assumed) group interests. While the block vote phenomenon is mostly ethnocentric, that ethnocentricity stops at party lines. Hispanics normally block vote for other Hispanics, but only for Democrats. Hispanics voted for Anglo Democrat Paul Sadler over Hispanic Republican Ted Cruz in the 2012 Texas Senate race by 65%-35%, which shows that while ethnocentric voting is the norm in Hispanic communities, indeed all immigrant communities, this does not transfer to voting for a constitutional conservative, only for candidates promoting government handouts.[62] California legislators have even recently changed their general election rules so that the top two primary candidates face off in the general election, rather than candidates representing different political parties. This has changed California’s statewide elections into giant Democratic primaries between various identity politics groups. The most recent California Senate election was between the black/Asian/Indian/feminist and far-leftist Kamala Harris and the Mexican/feminist far-leftist Loretta Sanchez, and the most intersectional woman won.[63]

“To its dismay, the American Left is utterly bereft of working-class members— the very proletarian masses they hoped to champion! Instead, their meetings are jammed with college professors and feminists. But you know where liberals have finally found a working class amenable to left-wing politics and violent political demonstrations? Take a look at Latin American politics for your clue.” [64]

Just as Mexicans bring their culture of increased crime, trash, drugs, corruption, and identity politics into California, changing it into a one-party state, Americans fleeing from California due to the worsening social and political climate there are bringing their left coast left-wing ideas to other states of the Union, making them more inclined toward identity politics and socialism. As identity politics becomes normalized and explicit in California, the entire United States teeters on the brink of disaster, as the dwindling white majority in the rest of the US will rush to embrace identity politics themselves out of a sense of self-defense. You and I think we should vote based on ideology, on adherence to the constitution, or on the principles of individual rights. Third World immigrants as a whole don’t vote that way. They block vote for the politician who “looks like them” or who “speaks their language”—ideas be damned. This has been studied for five generations of immigrants, and the block vote mentality, which gets worse in the 2nd and 3rd generations, only begins to abate in the fifth generation.[65]Five generations, over a hundred years, and the block vote mentality only starts to abate. In these Third World immigrant cultures and communities, the only political “principle” is bringing home the government bacon for their particular ethnic or minority group. We understand, even if we don’t approve, when we see this phenomenon in Iraq or Afghanistan; but it’s now the rule in California. The logical conclusion to this full rush toward identity politics in the Democratic Party is that they eventually will be met with equivalent identity politics in the white community. The nascent white nationalism we see today is not the result of President Trump. It is a preview of how bad things are going to be in 2024 or 2028, if Third World immigration isn’t curtailed. And what type of person—what type of Caesar-wannabee—is going to pop up then to collect the payoff? We’re going to yearn for the relatively benign President Trump when that happens. The entire thought of my having to join one racist gang to protect myself and my family from the depredations of other racist gangs, as if I were in a maximum security prison, disgusts me profoundly, but that’s where we are heading because of unchecked third world immigration combined with multiculturalism.

Culture

When one mentions the word “culture” associated with non-Americans, generally people think of how foreigners dress, what they eat, and maybe some holidays or traditions that are not generally celebrated in the United States.[66] Given that we all like to eat Chinese food, read our fortune cookies, and look at the placemat to determine that we were born in the Year of the Tiger, most Americans think of culture as harmless. This is not true. These things are elements of culture, but they are extremely superficial.

One need only look at people on the other side of national borders with different cultures. Those cultures have different values, and acting on those values has produced drastically different results.[67] The idea that all cultures are equal, or should be equal, or should be equalized by government action or inaction (called “multiculturalism”) is a monstrous exercise in ignoring reality. The idea that the we should import foreign, hostile, or primitive cultures into the United States is suicidal.

A nation’s culture rests on a set of core beliefs on the relationship between individuals, what the proper purpose of life is, how families should operate, and how disputes are to be settled. Thomas Sowell describes the culture of one ethnic group that emigrated to the United States as follows:[68]

The cultural values and social patterns prevalent among [this ethnic group] included an aversion to work, proneness to violence, neglect of education, sexual promiscuity, improvidence, drunkenness, lack of entrepreneurship, reckless searches for excitement, lively music and dance, and a style of religious oratory marked by strident rhetoric, unbridled emotions, and flamboyant imagery. This oratorical style carried over into the political oratory of the region …, and has continued on into our own times among … politicians, preachers, and activists. Touchy pride, vanity, and boastful self-dramatization were also part of this … culture among people from regions … “where the civilization was the least developed.” [Sowell’s footnotes omitted].

The immigrants Sowell is referring to are the Scots-Irish, who settled in Appalachia in the early 1700s, and gave their culture to much of the South, even to those people who emigrated from the South to other areas. They gave us the Hatfields and McCoys, and exhibited “a touchiness about anything that might be even remotely construed as a personal slight, much less an insult, combined with a willingness to erupt into violence over it.”[69] These immigrants were not from English or European world, but from the “Celtic Fringe,” and it took a very long time (over 200 years) and some unique circumstances for them to assimilate into American culture. Sowell also describes the mass immigration of Irish refugees into the United States,[70] especially as a result of the Great Potato Famine of 1845-1852. These additional Celtic Fringe immigrants also had serious problems, including alcoholism and violence, and were not fully assimilated into the United States for over 100 years. Sowell describes a number of immigrant groups to the United States, some having more success assimilating and some having less or none. The entire book Ethnic America is worth reading for an overview of this topic. It was certainly surprising to me that the least successful voluntary immigrants were from Scotland and Ireland. After all, they had three things going for them that other immigrant groups did not have: they spoke English, they were white and thus were immune to racial animus, and they were Christian. Yet their Celtic culture was a massive impediment to their success in the United States. The final advantage these groups had over current immigrants is that their waves of immigration ended, leaving the immigrant groups “stranded” in the United States and thus forced to deal with other Americans and to find ways to fit in, rather than being able to carve out and maintain perpetual cultural enclaves independent of the rest of the country.

One of the important elements in assimilation that Sowell only briefly touches on, and in my view underestimates, is the role of war in accelerating assimilation. Before the American Civil War, many ethnic enclaves did in fact exist in the United States, and in no way could the country be called a “nation,” united in language, culture, and religion. The Civil War threw large numbers of disparate ethnic groups into close proximity in literal life-and death circumstances, where each individual and unit had to depend on other individuals and units from other states and cultures for their very survival in battle. Before the Civil War, there were Minnesotans, Ohioans, Pennsylvanians, and Mainers. After the Civil War, at least in the North, there were only Americans. This state of affairs ended with the mass immigration of the late nineteenth century from all different European countries, and the same sort of ethnic enclaves were created throughout the United States. While mass immigration was ended in 1924, it was not until (and because of) the Second World War, in which 16 million men were drafted into the armed forces and forced to rely on each other, this time intermingled inside units, unlike during the Civil War, that mass assimilation occurred. The Scots-Irish, the Irish, the Italians, the Jews, even by the end of the war the Chinese and Japanese, were finally assimilated fully into American culture. Only blacks were excluded, and not for long. It is no coincidence that the Black Civil Rights movement occurred immediately after the end of World War II. All of the philosophical elements—now learned from the hard experience of war, rather than repeated as platitudes—were there to welcome blacks as full citizens of the United States, where before the War these elements did not seem real to people. Those of us reading this essay all came to adulthood after the United States became a culturally uniform and unified nation. We never experienced what it was like before this mass assimilation occurred, though we are getting a taste of it now in the American Southwest. One must read of the intercultural conflicts, violence, and interethnic crime of the pre-War era to get a taste of the problems that plagued the United States. And these cultures were almost all Western.

Today’s immigrants are unlikely to be from Western countries, to speak English, to “yearn to breathe free,” or be Christians or Jews.[71] They come from Third World countries filled with corruption, crime, misogyny, and Islam. They have none of the cultural benefits the Irish, Italians, Jews, or Chinese had in coming to America. Individual immigrants from third world countries can become good Americans, but mass immigration from the Third World is incompatible with American culture.

Many Objectivists look to America in the Nineteenth century, when we had mass immigration with limited restrictions, and no welfare, and everything worked out great. (This is not true—everything did not work out great, read Ethnic America—but it has a veneer of truth almost entirely based on constant repetition by the government schools and in the media.) So why not repeat that formula today? The reason is that our 19th century immigrants were almost entirely from countries that embraced Western Civilization: Britain, France, Germany, Sweden, Italy, etc. There is a huge difference between importing two million Swedes and two million Somalians.

This is not a thought experiment, this actually is happening. President Obama, under pressure from that most anti-American and pro-immigration institutions, the United Nations, imported 100,000 Somalian refugees to Minneapolis. Somalia is a country of chaos, misogyny, child rape, crime, gangsterism, and jihad. Tell me this: when importing 100,000 Somalians to Minneapolis, are we going to get 100,000 new productive Americans or are we going to turn Minneapolis into a center of chaos, misogyny, child rape, crime, gangsterism, and jihad? This is not a difficult question to answer, and those readers familiar with Minneapolis know the answer is not pretty.[72]

It’s not just Somalia, of course, all Third World cultures have similar characteristics to some extent. Mexico is a country filled with corruption, gangsterism, misogyny, and child rape. Now, so is Southern California, Arizona, and Southern Texas. Why are people surprised at this? Sure, if one Mexican family comes into the US, they will adapt quite quickly. Even ten or fifty Mexican families will do so. But we have imported one quarter of the population of Mexico.[73] You did not read that wrong. And one-third more of Mexico’s population would move here if they could, half of those illegally.[74] What makes people believe assimilation under these conditions is even possible?

Third World countries are Third World countries for a reason. Individuals from those countries, seeking work and a better world, can and do improve the United States. But one can’t simply import a substantial fraction of the population of a Third World country into the United States and expect anything other than turning the United States into a Third World hell-hole, which you can visit if you drive around the generally nastier areas of Southern and Central California, Arizona, and Texas, which I have done personally. Why would anyone believe otherwise?

While philosophy drives history, it drives it, as Leonard Peikoff has shown in his book The DIM Hypothesis, through culture. Most individuals don’t know the first thing about Rousseau or Kant or Marx, but they understand their own culture (which is derived from these philosophers and tradition). American culture, the sense-of-life created by 300 years of reason, individualism, and freedom, though diminished repeatedly by bad philosophy, stands as a beacon of hope in the world, as long as it is not drowned out by an influx of cultures totally inimical to it. Immigrants must be willing to reject their own previous cultures in the strongest possible intellectual terms (ignoring the inessentials like food preference) before they can accept American culture (and the philosophy that underlies it) and become fully American. This simply cannot happen if when they come to America they are surrounded by twenty million of their own former compatriots and no actual Americans.

The idea that people will change their cultures immediately upon entering the United States is ridiculous. Immigrants to the United States in the past did not change their cultures for generations, and some didn’t change at all until we experienced a World War. The fact that it is possible for an immigrant to change cultures immediately does not mean he will. Nor does it mean that when an undifferentiated mass of people come, you can’t tell to two significant digits precisely what percentage will change in what time period, even if you can’t be absolutely sure which exact ones will and which exact ones won’t. This statement is not a violation of “free will.” Any individual has free will, consisting of the ability to choose to focus on reality and make choices based on reality. That doesn’t mean any individual will in fact focus and make the right choices. There are strong cultural, epistemological, and neurological mechanisms in place that present serious obstacles to such radical change, that’s why so few immigrants actually assimilate. Individual immigrant families, when placed in an American neighborhood, do much, much, better at assimilating than do immigrants in massive ghettos. This is not a new idea. George Washington wrote in 1794, [75] “The policy or advantage of [immigration] taking place in a body (I mean the settling of them in a body) may be much questioned; for, by so doing, they retain the language, habits, and principles (good or bad) which they bring with them. Whereas by an intermixture with our people, they, or their descendants, get assimilated to our customs, measures, and laws: in a word, soon become one people.” The ghettos reinforce all the bad cultural and epistemological approaches to life. This is why in America, assimilation was almost always done in the third, fourth, and fifth generations, or later. The sheer numbers of immigrants prevent immigrants assimilating. This is not rocket science, and open borders Objectivists should be ashamed of themselves for not at least researching the phenomenon before pontificating for mass immigration. If the United States is to preserve itself as a (semi-) free country, it must choose individual immigrants and the cultures they come from extremely wisely, given the welfare state and political problems discussed earlier. After all, there’s never a World War around when you need one.[76]

More Details on Culture

As discussed in the previous section, besides food, music, and holidays, cultural traits include attitudes on how to resolve disputes, how to treat family members, the appropriateness of mind-altering chemicals, the inclination towards work, and other traits. These are all important. If a culture values laziness over work, ignorance over education, drunkenness over sobriety, promiscuity over marriage, violence over communication, and theft over productivity, it will take a massive rejection of such a culture by an individual for him to be able to become a productive American.

These cultural differences are not the root of the issue, they are based on more fundamental assumptions—extremely ingrained—about the nature of reality and the proper approach to it.

“Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed,” said Francis Bacon, but a person’s (and a culture’s) temperament must be oriented toward obeying nature (i.e., reality). Unjustified anger, a rush to judgment, and panic under stress are all underlying traits that cultures either promote or disdain, leading to a culture of violence or a culture of peaceful cooperation and communication. Anger is normal. Impulsively acting aggressively when you are angry because one’s culture teaches that is “the way things are supposed to be” is destructive.

Cultures promote attitudes toward time horizons. Should an action be a benefit to the individual/group/family right now or should the long term consequences be considered first? Short time horizons are the most important aspect of criminal thinking.[77] If a person only thinks of what will occur in the next five minutes or next hour, why not rob that convenience store? Why not beat your wife when she annoys you? Why get an education? Why work diligently? Why save money? Why not sleep with lots of women? Why use birth control? None of these things make sense if a person, influenced by a culture, only cares about minutes, hours, or days. A child takes nine months to develop and twenty years to mature. These time horizons are far beyond many individuals’ grasp, and the understanding of time horizons vary considerably among different cultures.[78] If a culture values monogamy and children, they almost certainly value education and savings. If they don’t value monogamy, they also seldom save money for the future. A culture’s appreciation for long-term thinking, planning, and saving, imprinted on its individuals from an early age, is the major predictor of success at home and as immigrants to the United States.

Cultures also promote self-responsibility. Stanton Samenow in his book Inside the Criminal Mind reminds us that almost all criminals think they are victims.[79] Samenow’s thesis is that criminality is based on a mode of thought. But except for cases of brain damage, modes of thought are not invented by each child ex nihilo, they are learned from their parents, friends, or schools or are part of the culture in which they grow up. If the culture promotes self responsibility, an individual has a much greater chance of embracing self-responsibility than he would if the culture promotes victimhood. Any individual can choose to reach beyond the culture he grows up in, but very few individuals actually accomplish that.

The final fundamental element of culture is the idea of reciprocity and its relationship to in-group preference. Every single human being, except for complete psychopaths and college professors,[80] exhibits in-group preference. We prefer our own children to others’. When a neighbor’s house catches on fire, we rush to help, stay up all night fighting the fire and rescue their belongings, inviting them into our house to stay, even though when a tsunami kills 250,000 people half a world away, we may only write a $50 check to the Red Cross. We care about our own schools, not the schools of other countries. We care about our own country and our countrymen in preference to other countries or foreigners in general. We care about people who share our religion and culture more than people who don’t. In short, in-group preference is essentially built into the human way of thinking. However, what is not built in is how we feel about and treat members of the out-group. That is a critical cultural trait. Post-Enlightenment Western culture holds philosophically that non-members are human beings with all the rights and responsibilities that entails.[81] Western culture engages in reciprocal respect and tolerance. Non-Western cultures almost universally do not. Islam, in particular, is philosophically committed to the proposition that non-Muslims are subhuman. This anti-reciprocity cultural trait is manifested in a number of different ways, but primarily in the realms of honesty and cooperation. In many non-Western cultures (especially Islamic cultures) honesty in communication and business dealings is something solely reserved for the in-group. Dishonesty (or lack of honesty as a principle) is the norm for dealing with members of the out-group, if dishonesty is thought to bring some immediate advantage. American businessmen who deal in international trade spend a great deal of time finding those specific individuals in foreign countries who they can trust, and of course the more educated and “Westernized” foreign business leaders have learned that productivity and success in global trade requires scrupulous honesty and cooperation, but this significant requirement of global trade has not yet filtered down to the ordinary person in many countries, much less into many of the people from those countries who wish to come to the United States.

Rejection of aggression, long time horizons, self-responsibility, and the recognition of reciprocity lead to productivity, savings, sexual restraint, close family ties, a focus on education, a rejection of welfare benefits, and law-abidingness. These are critical personal characteristics of any intended immigrant to the United States. We cannot craft a rational pro-American immigration policy that ignores the fact that individuals can reject their native culture and become Americans. However, it would be insane to assume that every immigrant, or even many immigrants, or even more than a very few immigrants, will do so. Which means we must take culture into account when deciding on immigration policy.

Human beings are not fungible economic widgets. Just because a person wants a job in the US and an employer wants to hire that person, does not mean it is in the self-interest of the United States (“the moral goal of keeping Americans free”) to allow that person to enter. “Import people, and you import their culture. Import them on a small scale, as with the Normans, and they may assimilate, but in doing so, they will still influence yours. Import them on a larger scale, and they’ll keep their own culture, which will conflict with yours. Import them on a large enough scale, as with the Saxons, and your culture will be the one assimilated. And if that happens, you find yourself at the mercy of whatever the newcomers decide to do with you.”[82]

One additional important detail about multiculturalism is that cultural diversity in neighborhoods decreases social trust, even among the in-group.[83] An all-native American neighborhood, such as the one I grew up in and the ones some of my friends live in today, has a large amount of social trust, engagement, mutual assistance, friendship, cooperation, etc. This is also true of an all-Chinese neighborhood and an all-Mexican neighborhood in the United States. But in a multicultural neighborhood, such as the one I live in today, social trust is almost entirely absent. The authors of the cited studies offer a number of theories as to why, in a multicultural context, people “hunker down” and stay inside their homes and yards. The cause is not simple xenophobia, because the lack of social trust even occurs within the in-group in multicultural neighborhoods, not just between the in-group and the out-groups. This is my everyday experience. It could be exacerbated by the simple fact that when dealing with another human being, one is limited to reason, force, or avoidance as the only alternatives. When communication is literally not possible, which it almost invariably is even if the immigrants have a smattering of English, because of the different cultural contexts underlying the communication, then you are left with simple avoidance as the only means to deal with the people around you. As avoidance becomes the norm, you avoid people even when they are in your own cultural group too, as a habit. This phenomenon leads to a serious dilemma: if you want to have social trust, segregate by ghetto; but if you want to have assimilation, minimize or prevent ghettos from forming. Continuous, relentless immigration from non-Western countries has a seriously deleterious effect on both social cohesion and the maintenance of cooperation, neighborliness, and the long-term viability of American culture.

My conclusions from this study of culture are:

Immigration from non-Western cultures must be permitted only in individual cases judged individually. Individualized screening for compatibility with American freedom and the self-interest of the United States is required. That means no mass migrations into the US ever. Even with individualized screenings, there still must be some maximum limit to the number of immigrants from any given non-Western culture. If there is no limit, there can be no assimilation. If George Washington could see this in 1794, it should be obvious to us 222 years later. This limit may be relatively large depending on the specific culture, as it has been in the past, but it is finite. There are deep roots to behavior that generates aggression, crime, misogyny, and irresponsibility. Saying people have free will is not a magic wand that you can wave to make these deep roots go away. They have to be removed with the utmost seriousness and purpose by the individual who grows up in these cultures. Their removal must be demonstrated for that individual to become an immigrant.

Given that assimilation is not automatic, and indeed in US history full assimilation was the result of rather radical external circumstances such as the Civil War and World War II, if America is to remain free, immigration must be highly selective.

Immigrant Crime

It may be the case that immigrants as a whole commit crimes at a similar rate to native Americans. Data on crime is difficult to obtain, subject to bias, and confounded by the fact that data does not take into account crime by legal immigrants versus crime by illegal immigrants.[84] However, it is certainly provable beyond a shadow of a doubt that immigrants from certain countries (and cultures) commit crimes at a much greater level than natives in the United States. The previously referenced CIS study provides one admittedly anecdotal elucidation of immigrant crime:

The FBI maintains a list of most-wanted murderers. This list is relevant to the debate over immigrant criminality because the FBI compiles a detailed profile of each individual on the list and makes it public. In almost every case the list includes the fugitive’s country of birth. In the spring of 2009 there were 76 individuals on this list, 73 of whom had a country of birth listed. Of the people on the list, 43 individuals (57 percent) were born outside of the United States. If we use only those for whom their country of birth was known as the denominator (73), then 59 percent were foreign-born. The overwhelming majority of foreign-born murderers (35) were born in Mexico. While the information is almost certainly very accurate, it is of limited use in trying to understand immigrant criminality because it is only one small category of criminals. It is also important to understand that it is not a list of the worst murderers in the country; rather it is a list of the most-wanted fugitive murderers in the country. Foreign-born individuals can more readily flee to other countries where they have existing ties, making them more likely to end up on a list of fugitives. Nonetheless, the extremely large share of these murderers who are immigrants is troubling. As will be recalled, only 15.4 percent of the adult population is foreign-born. The fugitive murderer profiles are an indication that immigrant crime may not be as low as some researchers have argued. [Footnotes from the original have been omitted].

An additional CIS report describes in detail how our porous borders promote international criminal gangs and organized crime. I apologize in advance for quoting the report at length, but this section really must be read in its entirety to be appreciated.[85]

If immigrant crime victims are reluctant to come forward to police, immigrant criminals often know how to make themselves scarce, and not necessarily by remaining or even operating within the U.S. A large portion of ethnic crime in this country can be linked to international networks. “Hundreds of thousands of people are being moved globally by highly organized criminal enterprises operating on all continents,” noted Robert Perito, director of the State Department’s Office of International Criminal Justice a few years ago. “Their primary target is the United States.” It would seem many of these criminals are hitting the mark. That slavery has been illegal in this country for almost a century and a half has not deterred certain immigrant groups from reintroducing it. A few years ago a Mexican immigrant couple was arrested for enslaving a large number of their deaf countrymen in a ring with operations in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Dallas, Arizona, North Carolina, and South Carolina. The Chinese operate what observers are calling a “new slave trade” in the U.S. Among certain nationalities fraud is woven into the economic culture. Telephone fraud has run rampant among some immigrant groups; one estimate several years ago put the cost of long-distance scams to U.S. phone companies and customers nearly $2 billion a year. One Secret Service agent characterized the problem of credit-card fraud among Nigerians as “absolutely epidemic.” U.S. officials started keeping records in this area by ethnic group in 1989; by a half-decade later, they had arrested more than 1,000 Nigerians. A new kind of credit card scam, involving hand-held “skimmers,” is an up-and-coming practice among immigrant theft rings. The crook, often a restaurant waiter, swipes a credit card through the skimmer, usually disguised as a pager or worn inside a jacket, and stores data embedded inside the magnetic security stripe. It is possible to transmit hundreds of stolen card numbers via e-mail to card cloning mills run by Latin American, Asian, Russian, and Nigerian crime syndicates. Consumers have to go through an involved process to get unauthorized charges removed, while card issuers pass along the costs anyway in the form of higher interest rates and fees. “It’s not unusual,” noted Gregory Regan, head of the Secret Service’s financial-crimes division, “to see a card compromised in New York City or Washington and the numbers used overseas, in Taiwan, Japan or Europe, within 24 to 48 hours.” To an extent, crime rings are based somewhere else and expand here rather than vice versa. Criminal gangs operating out of Poland and the Czech Republic recently have developed close ties to mobsters in Chicago and New York. Much of the Russian mob’s activity is run directly from Moscow, with the Russian government all but a rubber stamp for gangsters. Russian-based gangsters, and their local chieftains in more than a dozen American cities, have infiltrated Wall Street brokerages, the Bank of New York, the Medicare program, and even the National Hockey League to commit massive scams. Rep. Jim Leach, R-Iowa, chairman of the House Banking Committee, has estimated that billions of dollars have been laundered out of Russia through U.S.-based Russian mobsters since 1995, and that dozens of Western banks have been used as conduits for the money. Russian mobsters also have set up shell companies in the Brighton Beach area of Brooklyn, N.Y., to sponsor U.S. visas for fellow criminals or hire sophisticated money managers and lawyers in Los Angeles and Denver to invest in import-export companies. Asian crime lords in the 1990s aggressively recruited immigrants to the U.S. to serve as their foot soldiers. Even where organized immigrant crime consists of local gangs, it can be a potent force. In 1992 INS formed a 120-member Violent Gang Task Force; within a few years task force agents were arresting some 2,000 legal and illegal immigrants annually. [Footnotes from the original have been omitted].

Finally, the CIS report documents an increase in criminal behavior by the second generation of immigrants from certain countries, primarily Mexico, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. Again, the report must be quoted at length to understand the issue fully:

Even if immigrants are no more prone to commit crimes than are citizens, this tendency may not necessarily hold true for their offspring, who are American-born or at least residents of the U.S. from early childhood. Criminologists in this country long have theorized that the second, more than the first, generation of an immigrant population is likely to drift into crime. The first generation, having braved all kinds of hardship to enter the U.S., found it necessary to defer gratification in the interest of long-term success. But the second generation, though often as poor as their parents upon arrival, has less perspective on the Old World from which their parents came, and often in response develops an attachment to deviant subcultures, such as gangs, as a wayward continuation of the “old-fashioned” European peasant societies of their parents. Joining delinquent subcultures can be a way for the second generation to resist acculturation into the mainstream of the new country. The aforementioned federal commission reports of 1901, 1911, and 1931 each observed that the children of immigrants are more predisposed toward crime than their parents. The phenomenon of crime among the second generation of the post-1965 immigration liberalization law is recent, and as such has not produced a large body of research. But local law enforcement officials around the nation are all too aware of Hispanic, Asian, and other youth gangs whose members largely were born in the U.S. or were brought here as very young children. In suburban Northern Virginia outside Washington, D.C., police estimate that about 20 to 30 ethnic gangs, with a combined total of more than 2,000 members, have been responsible for dozens of recent attacks involving the use of machetes and baseball bats. Some 600 youths in Fairfax County alone have ties to Mara Salvatrucha, a notorious Los Angeles-based gang (founded in the 1980s by El Salvadoran nationals) responsible for what likely have been hundreds of slayings nationwide over the past decade.[86] California State University, Chico, sociologist Tony Waters recently did a full-scale analysis of second-generation immigrant crime, comparing data on selected recent ethnic groups of today with data on certain groups of the early 20th century. The results suggest that the problems brought by high immigration levels can have a substantial echo effect. Waters found that second-generation immigrant crime differs widely across nationalities. The key element is the presence or absence of a large proportion of young males. Ethnic groups with high proportions of young males, all things held equal, have a bigger crime problem, although neighborhood ethnic heterogeneity, poverty rates, and other factors do exert influence as well. In the case of Laotians the time lag between migration to the emergence of youth crime was only about five to 10 years, significantly shorter than, for example, Molokan (Russian) immigrants of the 1920s. Table 1 shows the divergence in serious crime rates Waters found among Asian second-generation youth in California in the early 1990s. [Emphasis mine, original footnotes omitted].

Open borders apologists generally claim “the data show that immigrants are less prone to crime than are native Americans.” However, this drops the context of immigrant culture. [87] As you can see from the previous chart (which only measures Asian youth in California), there is a difference of more than an order of magnitude between the criminality of Japanese and that of Laotians. No sane immigration policy would ignore this cultural difference between potential immigrants, or ignore the fact that most crime is committed by single men aged 16-35.[88]

Mexican Immigration

Mexico sends more immigrants to America than any other country. Many of the Mexicans come to work, doing difficult physical labor such as farm labor, construction, or landscaping. These are not jobs that middle class American youth would ever conceive of taking at the wages offered, yet Mexican immigrants come willingly to do them, sometimes in sweltering heat, sometimes for ten to twelve hours a day for six to seven days a week. Some Mexican immigrants become farmers themselves or businessmen and send their kids to school or college. Some Mexicans want to become Americans, and work to learn English, improve their education, obey the laws, and create a middle class existence for themselves and their families. Many Mexicans that came and stayed before the Immigration Act of 1965 and the rise of multiculturalism are no longer even “Mexican-Americans.” They are just Americans. But nowadays these are the exceptions rather than the rule, and the reasons are two-fold: there are simply too many Mexicans in some parts of the US for assimilation to be possible, and the preaching of multiculturalism and race hatred against Anglos by the intellectuals has made it almost impossible for Mexicans to know they might want to become Americans. It’s not that most of them particularly want to change the Southwest into Mexico, but that’s the effect.

Hoover Institution scholar and classical historian Victor Davis Hanson, who owns a small farm in California’s Central Valley, is intimately familiar with the immigration crisis in California, and has written of his experiences in his book, Mexifornia:[89]

Most arrivals are given work by grateful employers. Indeed, businesses profit greatly from the aliens’ much-needed labor—even as the audacious newcomers are increasingly resented by millions of other Californians for coming in such numbers and under such unlawful circumstances. Although illegal aliens are eager to get a fighting chance to succeed in America, many are not prepped for, nor immersed into the cutthroat competitive culture they help to mobilize. Instead, in recent years they and their offspring have ended up in ethnic enclaves of the mind and barrios of the flesh. In these locations they often soon become dependent on subsidies—and too many of their children will join an underclass to be led by ethnic shepherds who often do more harm than good, however much they wish to help. Since roughly 1970, the evolving concept of multiculturalism—which holds that Western civilization merits no special consideration inasmuch as all cultures are of equal merit—has proved to be the force-multiplier of illegal immigration from Mexico. … Unlike the Poles, Germans, Chinese, Greeks, Italians, Jews and Japanese, who usually came en masse and then stopped abruptly, Mexican immigration, at least since 1970, has proven to be a steady surf rather than a single tidal wave.

Hanson’s experience with crime, everyday crime, casual crime, thoughtless crime, is eye-opening. Even a box with the manuscript edits for this very book was casually stolen from his front porch while he was in the process of writing it.[90] Illegal aliens utterly disrespect his property rights, casually park on his farm, do drugs on his farm, crash their vehicles into his crops, destroy thousands of dollars of vines or trees, steal his fruit crops, abandon their vehicles and trash on his farm for him to have to pay to clean up. None of these people are legal immigrants, none have any documentation at all. And the police laugh at Hanson when he wants justice.

“Almost one-quarter of California’s inmates are from Mexico, and almost a third of recent drug-trafficking arrests involved illegal aliens.” [91] On our streets I have no idea whether the mostly young male illegal aliens I meet are economic refugees or fugitives from crime in Mexico, perhaps serious felons—and no one else does either, because there is no legal record of their existence, and what documents they and our local authorities possess are almost always fraudulent, forged to mask the conditions of their arrival.[92]

The casual criminals, as bad as they are, have nothing on the Mexican criminal gangs who roam the streets of the cities, preying on each other and selling drugs smuggled across the border.

It’s not only crime that plagues Mexican towns in America, but disease:

Besides the stabbings, the drunk-driving arrests and the risk of driving at high speed on the interstate without more than a few days of automobile experience, there is, of course, the plague of alcohol. Latinos die from cirrhosis of the liver at a rate higher than any other ethnic group, and twice the rate of whites. The rates of gonorrhea, herpes, chlamydia and venereal warts are epidemic in the immigrant population of young adult males—and rarely discussed. HIV infection is also generally recorded at twice the percentage found in the native white population. Our social health industry—which daily publishes a myriad of details about farm workers’ mental health problems, the pathologies of a newly acquired diet of fatty processed food, and the lack of good dental care—ignores the fact that hundreds of thousands of young Mexicans suffer from an array of venereal diseases. I have seen workers plagued for days by painful urination from recurring venereal infection, resistant to one-time and often improperly administered prescriptions of antibiotics. Others only haphazardly take medication for tuberculosis, a disease that is thirteen times more likely to be found in Hispanics than in whites. Not long ago, Hernando, who used to come by to borrow money, peddle illegal fireworks and look for scrap iron, said his “little” cough was now “three years old,” and swore the medicine was worse than the disease—and thus to be avoided at all costs. I apologized for not wanting to talk closely with him and holding my breath as he went on and on. Nineteenth-century ailments that are rare among citizens of rural California—adult whooping cough, hepatitis, even tetanus—are not so rare among illegal immigrants, who enter without the health checks normally demanded of immigrants a century ago.[93]

Of course, when they are treated at all, these diseases are treated courtesy of the US and California taxpayers.

While many of them come to work, many fail to find it:

Drive into any central California town at 11 A.M. and you will see hundreds of adult males walking the sidewalks, sitting in cafes, milling around at the stores, or loitering in front of their apartments—all of them not working, all of them on some sort of donation, and most of them wounded veterans of some of the hardest jobs in America. Our government says that local Central Valley towns experience a 15 percent unemployment rate. The naked eye suggests instead that a quarter of the populace lacks a full-time job. [