Are "Boundaries of Order" the Solution for Immigration?

Private Property as a Social System

I just published a fantastic conversation with The Brownstone Institute’s Jeff Tucker, on the topic of immigration and open borders. We talked about what’s going on at the Southern US border, how so much of the current crisis is due to government intervention, not the lack of it, and whether libertarians are wrong to favor open borders.

We didn’t come away with any solutions, but we did touch on some issues that I think most open-border proponents either don’t want to talk about, or pretend aren’t problems. I still do not support the nation state, or any kind of coercive monopoly entity. But I do have questions.

I was thinking about who I wanted to talk with next on this topic, and it hit me: Who I really want to have on my show to talk about this is my dad.

I can’t do that of course. He passed away just over four years ago.

But what I can do is point people to his most relevant work on this topic, which is of course, his book Boundaries of Order. You can download it for free from the Mises Institute, or buy it from them, or on Amazon.

Here’s what the Mises Institute says about it:

“The life of a society is found in the relations between its individuals and their property-based associations. But property always has a social end, he argues. Our lives are bound up with each other within the division of labor, while our individual interests are unavoidably intertwined. If we are to live as free individuals, we must cooperate with others in voluntary association.

“He further discusses the albatross of collectivism and its grave consequences, but he understands the collective in a different way. He views it as a pyramidal model that is forced to fit on a diffuse and changing social order; it relies most fundamentally on violence but cannot achieve any socially useful end. The analysis applies not only to socialism but to all models of top-down management, even that which relies on the myth of limited government.

“The state, in contrast, is always working to strangle this life. If a society is to change and thrive, it cannot and will not tolerate the state. The state has no creative purpose, only a destructive one. The great accomplishment of Shaffer here is to crystallize existing knowledge about how society works in real life and to cut through the propaganda on the state to show how the state everywhere operates as an enemy of society.”

The current Texas border crisis is a near perfect example of state control in an area of our lives tends to produce results that are antithetical to our interests and I would even say destructive of our social order. Immigration is hardly an isolated example. Think government schools, the welfare state, the war on drugs, foreign policy, regulation of absolutely any industry or activity anywhere.

This is something conservatives are happy to acknowledge when we’re talking about the welfare state, but prefer to ignore when it’s the projects to which they have an emotional attachment: Immigration control, national defense, etc.

Boundaries of Order (and my father’s thinking generally) doesn’t suffer from the problem of being attached to certain policy outcomes. It’s really about fundamental principles. From the book:

“The question that has always confronted mankind is whether society will be conducted by peaceful or violent means. Our conditioned thinking, however, has kept us from examining the implications of these alternative forms of behavior. The distinction between such practices rests on whether trespasses will or will not be allowed to occur. It is not that property trespasses can produce violence; they are violence, whatever the degree of force that is used. The property principle — in restricting the range of one’s actions to the boundaries of what one owns — precludes the use of violence. As long as we choose to deny the necessity of this principle, we should cease getting upset over the political and private acts of violence that are the unavoidable consequences of failing to respect the inviolability of the lives of our neighbors.”

I think - no, I know - that my dad would have a lot of powerful and relevant things to say about our current immigration situation, and about immigration generally. I don’t know if he would have a good answer to my question of how to preserve a beautiful and cohesive culture in the absence of state border controls. But I’m sure he would have some good insights that would help to illuminate the question, and I would have loved to have him on my show to discuss it all.

There’s obviously a lot more to explore here, and I’ll be saying more on the topic soon. Once I stop crying.