Immigration is one of the few places where Anarcho-capitalists disagree, but a great majority of the ones that I know tend to fall towards being anti-licensing of citizenship. Paleolibertarians such as LewRockwell.Com and the Mises Institute ted to fall towards statism when it comes to immigration, which is one of the reasons I don’t align with paleolibertarians 100%. I love the LRC, but my view on immigration falls into place when you look at the rights involved.

I don’t care where you were born or where you live. It doesn’t matter to me. Mexican, Polish, Russian and Jewish people live in my neighborhood: some first generation. They own their homes. Most of them own their homes for cash, no mortgage funded by Asian investors. I could care less how they came to this country, or even why, they’re older generation workers who proved they can work. I don’t think one of them relies on social security for their retirement, I’m certain that 3 of my close neighbors have a great amount of independent wealth.

For me, immigration boils down to the one basic human right: the right to owning property that you have maintained and made better. This right is superior to every other right, and I believe that this right covers all the other human rights out there. If you have a complete right to property, you don’t have to worry about any other rights: they’re covered.

The immigration issue gets foggy because of government’s madness over the centuries. Over time, more and more welfare systems have been put into place to transfer wealth from one group to another. Most people are xenophobes, whether they want to admit it or not. The average white anglosaxon will feel more comfortable around other white anglosaxons. The average black Brazilian who speaks Portuguese will feel comfortable around their kin of skin and language. That is how humans work. The biggest problem with xenophobia is when people wonder why another race of people are getting preferential treatment on the backs of the original group. It doesn’t matter if the skin colors are different — if there is an obvious racial or language difference, xenophobia sets in. We don’t want to pay for their laziness, their incompetence, their indifference to learning “our” culture and language. We’re sick of providing free services for those who don’t want to pay them themselves.

Yet this isn’t a cultural problem — Mexicans didn’t initially come over to America for free health care and food stamps. Millions came over to work, to make their lives better, to own a home and a car and a TV. And they did it — they virtually took over entire industries with zero preferential treatment or paternalism. The same can be said of the Poles and the Africans who came to the U.S. a generation ago — they wanted opportunity to succeed, they didn’t want guaranteed success.

Immigration is now being labeled a terrorism problem — why shouldn’t it? The ghost of terrorism is the number one reason that all governments in history have grown tyrannical and abused their citizen base; the spectre of fear created by hidden terrorist cells in your neighborhood gives many people additional xenophobia and desire to give government more power to flush them out. Yet how many people are killed by terrorists in this country, and how many people of foreign countries see us as the terrorist? The solution isn’t more force, it is more realization of the obvious: the U.S. is a monster, and we’re not attracting the good workers, anymore. We’re not attracting people who want to find opportunity, since many previously communist nations are now better opportunities for an individual to succeed without help from the State.

I openly welcome aliens: illegal and legal. We can’t fix the immigration problem until we fix two bigger problems:

1. The reduction of property rights in this country
2. The increase of welfare and paternalism in this country

Both are directly responsible for the mess we’re in today, the reason for the mass xenophobia. Both of these problems are the faults of our parents and the generation before us — the so-called heroes of freedom. The previous generation created a monster through voting for monsters; they accepted jerrymandering and division of the voting block to let the monster grow and grow. They accepted a growth in the heavy hand of centralized government because they were repeatedly scared by the ghost of various enemies, including the French and the Spanish over 150 years ago. They became complacent, and they left us this mess to deal with.

And we can’t deal with it. Our blood and our souls harbor additional hatred for those alien to us, even those who were born here and have lived here for generations as we might have. It is normal to pick up the fears our parents had, even if they weren’t blatant at expressing them. It is abnormal to resolve those fears through logic, reasoning and love. Yet I’ve done it, and I take advantage of it — there are thousands of great relationships to be built with those different than me, and if they can see the problems that have created the immigration mess, maybe we can move toward a free society again.

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