Galtland Index

Open Borders

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Open Borders

Open borders, in Walter Block’s libertarian argument, means legally unrestricted peaceful movement by people who have somewhere to go by consent. It is not a right to trespass on private land; it is a rejection of state barriers against the migrants, employers, landlords, and relatives who would voluntarily deal with one another. On this view immigration restriction, not immigration, is the act of force — which makes it the direct counter to Hoppe’s forced-integration argument, and one of the sharpest disputes inside libertarian theory.

The non-aggression case

Walter Block, in A Libertarian Case for Free Immigration, runs the argument straight off the non-aggression axiom. Migration is not in itself an initiation of force; it is people peacefully moving and contracting with whoever will have them. In his formulation, emigration, migration, and immigration are all a kind of “victimless crime” — disliked, feared, or economically inconvenient to some residents, perhaps, but not by themselves a trespass against person or property.

That qualifier sets the boundary, and it is important: there is no freestanding right to walk onto anyone’s land. Block follows Rothbard in holding that a migrant must be received by some owner who will sell, rent, hire, or host him. But where such an owner exists, a state immigration ban violates that owner’s right to deal with the migrant. Open borders, in this sense, is a claim about the state, not a licence to trespass.

No middle ground

Block rejects an assimilation-based compromise — open in some eras, closed in others, half-open when unemployment or cultural tension makes it attractive. The only question a libertarian may ask, he argues, is whether the movement of people is itself a trespass: if it is, it must be barred completely, like murder or theft; if it is not, every restriction is illegitimate.

There does not appear to be any middle ground or compromise position consistent with libertarianism.

— Walter Block, A Libertarian Case for Free Immigration

Restriction as the aggression

This is the inversion that makes open borders the counterpoint to forced integration. A border barrier, Block argues, is not a passive line; it is state force used against peaceful people. His example is a traveler journeying to settle on his cousin’s land, stopped, jailed, or deported by the government before he reaches that consenting owner. The barrier, not the migrant, is the act of force — in Block’s words, “an immigration barrier is a physical invasion of innocent people.”

Where Hoppe sees the admitted migrant as forced onto unwilling residents, Block sees the excluded migrant — and the citizen who would have hired, housed, or traded with him — as the parties whose property and contract rights the border violates. It is the same possibility the forced-integration article reaches from Hoppe’s own forced-exclusion logic: the state can offend by barring as well as by admitting.

Crime, welfare, and postponement

Block treats the standard worries as arguments against other policies, not against immigration:

  • Crime. That open borders would import criminals is an indictment of the criminal-justice system and of drug prohibition, he argues, not of free movement; the remedy is the punishment of criminals, not force against innocent entrants.
  • Welfare. That migrants come for benefits is a quarrel with welfare, not immigration: abolish welfare, or at least immigrant eligibility, and the draw disappears. Block notes that Hoppe himself grants that immigration and the welfare state are analytically distinct problems — and that to bar people now for benefits they might later claim would, taken consistently, justify barring childbirth too.

His sharpest reply is to the claim that free immigration is correct only after every other libertarian reform is in place. He calls this the posture of “postponement libertarians,” and answers it by analogy to Rothbard’s critique of Alan Greenspan: a principle one will apply only when all surrounding conditions are perfect is a principle one never applies.

Public property and invitation

The dispute turns partly on public property. The restrictionist move is to manage public roads and spaces as a private owner would in a free society — and so to exclude. Block rejects the premise: state property is illegitimate and closer to unowned than to property held collectively by current citizens, so a migrant’s use of a public road trespasses against no rightful owner. And even granting the restrictionist’s own test, he argues, the result still favors entry — in a genuinely free society virtually every peaceful migrant would be received by some landowner, employer, relative, or merchant, leaving exclusion justified only in the rare case where no owner anywhere would have him.

Where it is contested

This is an intra-libertarian dispute, and the wiki documents it without taking a side. The restrictionist reply — Hoppe’s forced integration — is that Block’s clean separations do not hold in the world we have: so long as the state owns the roads and runs the welfare rolls, admitting newcomers forces residents to share political space, tax burdens, and public facilities with entrants no particular owner has invited, so that “free immigration” under those conditions is really compelled association. The debate ultimately rests on two unresolved questions: the moral status of public property (unowned, or held in trust for current citizens?), and whether immigration and the welfare state can be separated in practice as cleanly as Block separates them in theory.

Place in this wiki

Open borders is the nonaggression tradition’s answer to its own restrictionist wing. Read beside forced integration, it shows that the shared libertarian premises — self-ownership, property, freedom of association — do not by themselves settle the immigration question. Everything turns on who is cast as the aggressor (the migrant who arrives, or the state that bars him) and on what is owed to property the state wrongly holds — the same coercion-versus-consent line that runs under the rest of the wiki’s anti-state material.

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