STIGMERGY: The C4SS Blog
A Quick Note on “Borders”

Immigration is an issue on which there logically should be very little daylight between factions of the libertarian movement. It’s not that complicated: “National borders” are imaginary lines drawn on the ground by over-grown street gangs, and no one owes them any recognition whatsoever.

Alas, logic seems to have little weight in the argument, and lots of alleged libertarians have come up with lots of ways to get around the facts and arrive at the results they prefer.

Some of those ways are just silly, e.g. Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s suggestion that we should — just this once! — pretend that the state is a legitimate property owner, whose preferred disposition of its property just happens to match Hoppe’s own ideas on who should and should not be allowed to pass over that property and under what conditions.

Lately, however, the arguments are getting beyond silly and into purely bizarre (“[The ruling class] wishes to avoid more than token identification with the English people at large. … State-sponsored mass immigration has been the most obvious evidence of this desire.” ) and superstitious (“[I]f there’s national will to address it as a problem that threatens the foundations of a society, then a Nation has every right to do so.”) territory.

What’s up with that? If the subject were anything but immigration, libertarians would recognize the forgoing as the combination of Hitlerian ethnic pseudo-science and aboriginal witch doctor bullshit (but I repeat myself) that it is.

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