Objectivish blogger Grant Jones commented on the Objectivist position on open immigration here:

http://kalapanapundit.blogspot.com/2010/05/gov-brewer-takes-down-comic-in-chief.html

His argument is the demographic and culture argument that is everywhere in the Conservative blogosphere. Its extreme spokesman would be someone like Larry Auster.

He says that the popular Objectivist open immigration position is rationalism. I don’t have an answer for him because I often think the same thing myself. But if you go far enough down Grant’s road I can’t see how you don’t end up with a racial conception of nationhood which is exactly what many Conservatives want. I’m at a loss to counter Grant’s position though.

Do you see any half decent conservatives out there?

I do not concede that open immigration of a free nation would result in being overrun by primitives.

As for Israel, I and others have already said that a nation has the right to restrict entry for security reasons.

Rather than trying to play these “gotcha” games, I suggest that you try learning how to grasp and apply the principles put forth here in posts by myself and other Objectivists to particulars and derive the answer for yourself. Hell, I dare you.

Ashley: A deep-seated aversion to principled thought is one of the defining attributes of a conservative. They can *parrot* a principled argument, and even understand its parts pretty well, but simply cannot/will not abstract the principle from one particular application and apply it to another — especially when doing so contradicts one of their emotion-based beliefs.

There are conservatives all over the Internet who, by all appearances, have the principle of individual rights down when the topic is guns, but when immigration comes up, suddenly it’s all about citizenship. Whatever happened to “God-given” rights?

And then there’s the ones like Malkin, too sharp to evade the contradiction outright, who have to carefully misconstrue the Founders and their words in order to keep their pet statisms.

Do you support open immigration for Israel and New Zealand, even if it means these countries become Islamic?

In much the same way that a person established ownership of land under the homesteading process, they should have the option to take citizenship once they have similarly put down roots of permanency here.

I have no objections to the wait, seeing as citizenship is simply not a big deal in a free society. Contra Malkin, the Founders understood this too.

Leftists, operating on the same principle as conservatives, of course make a bigger deal about citizenship because for them, it’s all about power, not rights; for them, the vote is the be-all and end-all of “liberty”.

You may call that “determinism,” but I seriously doubt the situation is going to change significantly in 20 years.

Actually, fatalism would be the more accurate term. I defer to Sarah “No Fate” Connor on that one

While I favor open immigration, it would not be my first priority; abolishing the welfare state first would radically alter the intellectual and moral profile of people who would want to come here.

You know and I know that immigration is different from citizenship (which carries with it the right to vote.)

My problem is that I don’t believe that Obama and the Democrats know that and they have the Super Majority and the will to use it come what may. See Healthcare.

I’m for open immigration: allowing peaceful people to cross borders peacefully. But I don’t trust this bunch of crooks to implement it any more than I would trust a Republican.

Find me the solution to that conundrum will you?

You say: “No. Open immigration is not the same as open citizenship.” But what is your policy with respect to citizenship? If a person is in the US for, say, 5 years and hasn’t committed a crime, why wouldn’t the person be entitled to citizenship?

Since immigrants tend to vote Democratic it’s only a matter of time before the country would turn far left (if it hasn’t already) due to tens of millions of immigrants. All of the US would end up far left , politically correct and multicultural like LA . Just as soon as they arrive they will fall into the clutches of La Raza, labor unions, leftist politicians and the multicultural managerial state. You may call that “determinism,” but I seriously doubt the situation is going to change significantly in 20 years.

If you think that the application of individual rights to immigration means we should accept this, that’s one thing (although I don’t agree with it). Yet to deny that this is the likely result is naive.

As I’ve point out before (though it was an Objectivist who first metioned this), if Israel were to adopt these policies it would cease to exist within a generation.

Let me give another example. New Zealand has a population of 4.5 million. If it adopted open immigration how long would it take before Moslems from Malaysia and Indonesia become the majority?

Thanks for sending the NC’s readers to my piece, as well as for discussing these common “arguments” against immigration.

Gus

Ashely: as I noted in the update, *here* is the “airstrip” you asked me about some time about in my “cargo cult” post. See the update above!

They’re both pretty obviously silly if you have a clue. And of course if there’s any truth to them at all it’s only to the extent that the government forbids using vast amounts of land or creating of jobs.

Far more common, however, are the ones who say “Hell, no, we need less immigration!”… in which they confess what they sought to obscure: that they are anti-immigration, with all that implies about their basic political premise.

Here is one comment from Gus’ Pajamas article:

“Welfare state or not, US jobs generally pay better than Mexican jobs, and this is especially true with a country which is grossly oversupplied with low skill laborers, like Mexico. So the notion that elimination of all but the most modest notions of state support for the poor and or invalid will end illegal immigration is true only on the margin. . . That said, it’s clearly NOT in our best interest to import more low skilled laborers who have a bad attitude toward American culture and a tendency toward irredentism. ”

“Don’t let’s misunderstand the issue on immigration, we don’t need illegals, and neither do we need more “honest immigrants willing to work hard.” At 300 million people, the US is full up. Send the H1B visa holders home and hire Americans while we’re at it.

Oh, and get ready for Mexico to explode when 10 million+ workers return home without work and the remittances stop coming. We’ll need troops on our southern border in any event. Might as well start now.”

These are common arguments:

* An “oversupply” of unskilled workers is bad for an economy.

* Mexicans will still come here illegally if we had no welfare state.

* The US is saturated with too many people and we can’t assimilate any more.

* foreign labor threatens US jobs.

* the absolute necessity to militarize our Southern border.

All of these are not only morally flawed but awash in bad economics. But I think that this very representative criticism reflects the total misunderstanding of rights amongst conservatives and other right-wingers.

To the extent that immigration to the US is more open, there is a tremendous pressure on the rest of the world to become more free, or more people, particularly the more productive, will leave the less free countries. This, in turn, will indirectly benefit Americans (and everyone) economically, and in fact, places a reciprocal pressure on the US to continue to become more free.

This worldwide effect is, in my opinion, far more significant than any short-term gains to Democrats by newly-voting immigrants, or to slightly increased costs of welfare programs.