by George J. Dance
Immigration is one area in which libertarians have a hard time communicating meaningfully with otherwise libertarianish conservatives and centrists. One reason is that we look at the topic from two different perspectives (or two different "paradigms" as Thomas Kuhn called them), a difference which, if noted at all, is not discussed.
Libertarians are methodological individualists. They look at social interactions in terms of the individual actors involved, and how their actions harm or benefit other individuals. They would look at why a person comes to this country - to make a better life for himself and his family - which means to work and profit from it. They ask if his coming here and working betters or worsens other individuals' lives.
If an immigrant does and achieves what he wants - if he contributes and earns a good living - then he is purely a benefit. Maybe he gets a job that a native-born Canadian could have held, but he does not stop the latter from working. Maybe the immigrant collects too much tax money, which counts as a harm to some taxpayers, but that makes him no different from the Canadian-born guy - that is how the Canadian tax system is designed, to subsidize some at the expense of others - and if we tolerate the one being subsidized, we should tolerate the other.
The anti-immigration guy, on the other hand, looks at the problem collectively. He is not looking at Manuel or Mohammed coming here and working, but at "Mexicans" or "Moslems" as a group. He worries about the society's racial and cultural composition - which the libertarian, even if he understands the concern, does not see as something to be addressed by the criminal law.
But the idea of cultural composition is very hard for a libertarian to understand by itself. Libertarians do not deny (as anti-libertarian turncoat Murray Rothbard once claimed we did) that there are no group differences. Given their individualist perspective, though, they believe those differences to be insignificant, vastly overshadowed by differences among individuals within a group. The idea of groups is based on the abstract idea of "group identities," which the libertarian's observations lead him to reject: Group identities are simply averages, which say nothing about any actual group members.
When I look at immigration, I do not see an undifferentiated mass of Mexicans or Central Americans; I see Manuel and Manuel, guys whom I worked with at different companies for years. I do not see a homogeneous crowd of Moslems; I see Mohammed and Mohammed, Pakistani and Syrian-born neighbors in my apartment building. And so on: I think of these people and I ask myself: should what those men have done, and are continuing to do, be outlawed? And I have to say no.
In contrast, the anti-immigration guy sees only masses and crowds. He notices more colored faces in the city, for example, or he reads about their numbers and connects that with other numbers (like the fall in Canadian birth rates) to come up with trends that worry him. He focus is on the total social impact, which he thinks only the government has the power to do something about.
The individualist libertarian sees none of that. Like groups, social trends for him are only generalizations about what really goes on in a societry: real people trying to get on with their lives. And he believes that the latter (provided that those people are peaceful) is not something that the government should be trying to "do something" about.
Until we recognize those two different perspectives, and devise a language that reconciles them, there will be no real dialogue, no mutual understanding, and no possibility of agreement between individualist libertarians and their adversaries on this issue.
Immigration is one area in which libertarians have a hard time communicating meaningfully with otherwise libertarianish conservatives and centrists. One reason is that we look at the topic from two different perspectives (or two different "paradigms" as Thomas Kuhn called them), a difference which, if noted at all, is not discussed.
Libertarians are methodological individualists. They look at social interactions in terms of the individual actors involved, and how their actions harm or benefit other individuals. They would look at why a person comes to this country - to make a better life for himself and his family - which means to work and profit from it. They ask if his coming here and working betters or worsens other individuals' lives.
If an immigrant does and achieves what he wants - if he contributes and earns a good living - then he is purely a benefit. Maybe he gets a job that a native-born Canadian could have held, but he does not stop the latter from working. Maybe the immigrant collects too much tax money, which counts as a harm to some taxpayers, but that makes him no different from the Canadian-born guy - that is how the Canadian tax system is designed, to subsidize some at the expense of others - and if we tolerate the one being subsidized, we should tolerate the other.
The anti-immigration guy, on the other hand, looks at the problem collectively. He is not looking at Manuel or Mohammed coming here and working, but at "Mexicans" or "Moslems" as a group. He worries about the society's racial and cultural composition - which the libertarian, even if he understands the concern, does not see as something to be addressed by the criminal law.
But the idea of cultural composition is very hard for a libertarian to understand by itself. Libertarians do not deny (as anti-libertarian turncoat Murray Rothbard once claimed we did) that there are no group differences. Given their individualist perspective, though, they believe those differences to be insignificant, vastly overshadowed by differences among individuals within a group. The idea of groups is based on the abstract idea of "group identities," which the libertarian's observations lead him to reject: Group identities are simply averages, which say nothing about any actual group members.
When I look at immigration, I do not see an undifferentiated mass of Mexicans or Central Americans; I see Manuel and Manuel, guys whom I worked with at different companies for years. I do not see a homogeneous crowd of Moslems; I see Mohammed and Mohammed, Pakistani and Syrian-born neighbors in my apartment building. And so on: I think of these people and I ask myself: should what those men have done, and are continuing to do, be outlawed? And I have to say no.
In contrast, the anti-immigration guy sees only masses and crowds. He notices more colored faces in the city, for example, or he reads about their numbers and connects that with other numbers (like the fall in Canadian birth rates) to come up with trends that worry him. He focus is on the total social impact, which he thinks only the government has the power to do something about.
The individualist libertarian sees none of that. Like groups, social trends for him are only generalizations about what really goes on in a societry: real people trying to get on with their lives. And he believes that the latter (provided that those people are peaceful) is not something that the government should be trying to "do something" about.
Until we recognize those two different perspectives, and devise a language that reconciles them, there will be no real dialogue, no mutual understanding, and no possibility of agreement between individualist libertarians and their adversaries on this issue.
No comments:
Post a Comment