I should preface this by saying that I very much like Dave Smith and find him insightful in a wide array of topics. But, if I’m being honest, I didn’t think this was an especially strong debate performance. Whereas a lot of his debates are blowouts, I thought this was roughly evenly matched. However, certain elements of what he said I found very persuasive. In my humble opinion, more of these debates should be written, without a specified length of reply so that participants can reflect and present more complete and sourced information for us to review.
Let’s get into it. Dave starts by framing his view of reality, that voters generally reject mass immigration, that the first duty of government is to their people, and that the open borders position is unworkable because of the amount of people that would potentially move. In his view, nations are more than interchangeable economic units.
Then, he brings up a really interesting analogy of how even in Ellis Island the level of invasiveness is more significant than other types of rights, we can still have standards on public property and extrapolates from this that that if immigration is a policy, we can turn the volume to a direction that most people want. After all, electing Trump seemed to suggest that people want significantly less immigrants. Finally, he points out that there are significant public costs associated with immigrants that people would prefer not to bear, and seem to be extracted.
Alex starts off with trying to prove a thesis that immigrants are largely being targeted when other (welfare) stuff is to blame; that immigrants are mostly good for the economy and culture at large; and that tyranny largely comes from enforcing this type of rule in the first place.
His basic point for the first part is that it’s not the fault of immigrants that the welfare state is in place, and government regulation belies government regulation. One government regulation gives a justification for another. Intra-country we don’t seem to have a lot of problems with immigration (not everyone is moving to Texas) but welfare is really what’s causing this issue. Dave counters with the example of not letting homeless people sleep in his basement, one doesn’t have to not like someone to want space from them.
On this point, I sympathize with Alex’s perspective but mostly think Dave’s perspective wasn’t responded to. If I was to offer a response to Dave’s counterpoint of appealing to reality, I think he’s conflating two issues that I don’t think are the same.
The core of what Alex is getting at is in order to keep a coherent border, the state needs to get involved in all land purchases, ensuring that immigration remains restricted. Many of our IDs and social tracking are in large parts going towards keeping others out. These policies don’t exist in a vacuum, so agreeing with them in principle means accepting the really undesirable social tracking and other negative downsides.
Dave provides two responses: state is involved in solving murder and other crimes, and a Swedish factory thought experiment wherein the state should choose between selling the factory to taxpayers (proximate victims of govt redistribution) or strangers. Alex says one should sell to the group that makes the most cash to give back to the taxpayers. Dave points out that this just gives more money to the government but not those originally wronged most of the time.
Dave then moves to this idea that regardless of whether it’s giving more money to the government or creating a debt to begin with, the immigrants make the situation worse by giving more power to government. I think this is trying to have it both ways.
At this point, I found Dave’s argument extremely unconvincing for three reasons.
First, I think Dave dodges the baggage of an increased size of government due to immigration restriction. I think the govt is supposed to solve murder is a qualitatively different issue, movement isn’t a crime because it doesn’t affect people. Generally, we try to minimize government involvement even in dealing with disputes because of how terrible they are- see arbitration as opposed to working with government courts.
I think this is devastating for Dave’s argument because if it’s true that immigrants help keep the size and scope of government down in some part because of nativism, in other part because trying to deal with immigration results in authoritarianism, then this should easily be the most important issue for libertarians in particular in this debate.
Secondly, I think Alex is correct in pointing out that most of the arguments against immigration would seemingly apply to most other behavior that is socially unpopular. Gene brought up an interesting point in another debate about how birth control is widely available because of private property rights, even if most of the population doesn’t like it. The same is true for technology, for interracial marriage at certain points, marijuana, and so on. Much of being a free person means accepting that others have rights to their property and what they choose to do with it.
If the government can veto land purchases and tell others how to assemble, who we can sell bus/train/car tickets to, we’d rightly identify this as an incursion to interaction. I don’t understand why this wouldn’t infringe upon the free association value that Dave recognizes as important but unpopular in other contexts.
Third, I think from an economic perspective Dave is wrong. On the Swedish factory thought experiment, privatization aimed at keeping certain people rich (like former Soviet block countries) didn’t work because the resources weren’t utilized towards economic ends, and instead went to the politically most connected. If we’re sticking to the real world, we’d probably see a lot of cases Dave prefers as being disastrous in their own right.
Overall, I think this is a major blind spot in Dave’s perspective and we need to look for a better way of resolving this tension of avoiding siphoning off resources to random immigrants while also keeping freedom of movement.
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