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Harry Binswanger on National Sovereignty
America, in order to be good, must open its borders to the world – that is the theme of Mr. Binswanger’s latest essay on immigration. And I have to review it. The pain of setting the needle of my intellect in the groove of his sophistries may lead me to drink.
... Clever, I guess, but obsolete. Vinyl records are passé.
OK Froggy. The pain of focusing the laser of my intellect on the pits of his—
... CD’s are on the way out. Think WAV and MP3 files.
The pain of— oh forget it. Froggy you have sabotaged my introduction. Whose little frog are you anyway?
... I belong to no one but myself, I am a sovereign being!
I bought you for a buck ninety-eight plus tax and didn’t know what I was getting. Anyway, I’m glad you bring up sovereignty because Mr. Binswanger makes it the centerpiece of his new essay, titled: “What is national sovereignty?” [1] In an earlier essay [2] he had argued for open borders, concluding that:
“The only proper governmental ‘managing’ of our borders ... is keeping in good repair the ‘Welcome to America’ signs.”
He begins by saying that a nation’s existence depends on its having borders.
... All nations have borders. Check.
Froggy, that remark was unnecessary. Then he asks an odd question: In order for a nation to maintain its sovereignty must it defend its borders? His exact words are: “... doesn’t its maintaining its sovereignty imply the need to enforce or defend those borders?”
... No border defense, no sovereignty. Check.
Froggy, Mr. Binswanger was asking a question not making a statement, now please be quiet. In contrapositive form: If a country opened its borders would it lose its sovereignty?
What, he then asks, is sovereignty? Now he knows all along he will define sovereignty so it has nothing to do with borders open or closed, and that will make the answer to his earlier question “No” – a nation can be sovereign yet still have open borders.
And since he would have us believe that sovereignty so defined is all there is to worry about, we needn’t worry about open borders, QED. That’s where he wants us to go and he gets us there by playing fast and loose with definitions and ignoring the real world.
His argument has four parts:
1. A country’s border defines the geographic area within which its government enforces the country’s laws.
This definition fails to get at the essence of a country or its border. If by some catastrophe a country’s government became disabled, the country and its people would still exist (unless completely overrun by an invader) and so would the country’s border even if it became temporarily difficult to defend.
2. “ ‘Sovereignty’ refers to the government’s monopoly on force.”
This differs from what you find in the dictionary (Sovereignty: freedom from external control, autonomy). It also differs from Rand’s use of the word in The Virtue of Selfishness:
“A free nation – a nation that recognizes, respects and protects the individual rights of its citizens – has a right to its territorial integrity, its social system and its form of government. ...
“Such a nation has a right to its sovereignty (derived from the rights of its citizens) and a right to demand that its sovereignty be respected by all other nations.”
To Mr. Binswanger on the other hand, “ ‘Sovereignty’ refers to the government’s monopoly on force.” In his entire essay that is the only definition he gives of the word. I merely quote his definition, I cannot explain it Since government does have a monopoly on the use of force, a nation would possess sovereignty just by having a government, and his question above about maintaining sovereignty – must a nation defend its borders to maintain its sovereignty? – makes no sense.
Mr. Binswanger does let us know one thing that sovereignty is not: “Sovereignty is not ownership.” (He underlines the sentence.) It’s not Philadelphia Cream Cheese either, and if Mr. Binswanger wandered over the known universe telling us what sovereignty is not we might figure out what it is from what’s left over. At any rate, by putting together “Sovereignty is the government’s monopoly on force.” and “Sovereignty is not ownership.” he gets: The government’s monopoly on force is not ownership. Since that monopoly is the essence of government, he deduces:
3. “The government does not own the country.” (He underlines this sentence too.)
This is obvious and he didn’t need the preceding gobbledygook to get it. No Immigration Patriot believes the government does or should own all the property within its jurisdiction; for example no one at Vdare.com, the well-known Immigration Patriot website. [3]
You can see what Mr. Binswanger is driving at though. He thinks the government could legitimately restrict foreigners from coming across the border only if it owned all the property on its side.
4. Mr. Binswanger finishes with:“ ‘enforcing our border’ ... means not letting neighboring governments start to use their force within our borders. Enforcing the border is enforcing the government’s monopoly over force – it is not the initiation of force to obstruct or stop the free movement of individuals across that border.”
Enforcing our border means not letting other governments use force within it. It means enforcing our government’s monopoly over force. It does not mean interfering with the free movement of individuals across the border.
A foreign individual, in contrast to a foreign government’s army, has a right to cross your country’s border at will.
He then emphasizes his statement that sovereignty (as he defines it, we emphasize) has nothing to do with borders:
“... American sovereignty has to do with the reach of American law, not with any policy regarding immigration.”
...
“Immigration policy ... has no effect on sovereignty. The two are unrelated. Enforcing the border is a government-to-government issue. Our government must not let foreign police or military operate within our borders. Immigration is a government to individual issue: can the state use force against a person trying to drive on a public road that runs across the border?”
Note that he narrowed his focus from countries in general to America in particular. If he is true to the Ayn Rand Institute, none of this applies to Israel. (In public he refuses to discuss Israel’s Jews-only immigration policy.)
Mr. Binswanger isn’t through. He asks “What about the claim that a government needs to ‘protect’ or ‘defend’ our border?” He put the two simple words “protect” and “defend” in quotes apparently intending to belittle the sentiment behind them. He thinks he has our number for he answers:
“The people talking about keeping our sovereignty, enforcing our borders, defending our borders seem to actually mean: our government should use initiated force to obstruct or block the movement of people who want to work here, do business here, and live in peace here.”
Among Mr. Binswanger’s list of virtues – peaceful, hardworking, etc. – is a curious omission: voting capitalist. Perhaps he knew that he had to omit it. Third World immigrants by and large vote for statism, and even if they came here to avoid the consequences of statism at home. [5] Since his goal is to promote unrestricted immigration he had to leave out the virtue of capitalism – a small price for an Organized Objectivist to pay to get his open borders.
Then Mr. Binswanger, climbing atop his moral high horse, calls his opponents in this debate illogical, unjust, and un-American. Tribalist too, and every ARI follower knows that wanting to avoid the Other is the blackest of sins.
He claims that the propaganda put out by Immigration Patriots (a term he never uses) “paints immigrants as uncivilized, disease-ridden, and harboring a high percentage of thugs and criminals.” Mr. Binswanger has no sense of statistics, it’s all or nothing with him. At least he realizes that today “immigrant” usually means Third World immigrant. Many of them are some of the bad things he mentions, and a higher percentage of them than among American whites. This is a useful fact to point out to people who might at first shy away from the central pillars of a proper immigration policy, preference racism and preference culturalism.
Mr. Binswanger then equates the immigrants of today with those of the early part of the 20th century. [6] He must think his readers are too stupid to notice the difference between the immigrants of yesteryear and the immigrants of today, or too browbeaten by altruism to admit they see it. Noticing the difference might be construed as racist and we can’t have that. One must never, ever, notice.
Citing a CATO podcast by open-borders enthusiast Alexander Nowrasteh, Mr. Binswanger claims that the proportion of criminals among immigrants is lower than among Americans. The Most Wanted webpages of police departments across the U.S. prove otherwise but even if true it would be because of the non-white Americans within the category Americans. Third World immigrants have a significantly higher proportion of criminals than do whites.
Mr. Binswanger goes on to say: “Philosophically, though, it doesn’t matter.” On that we agree, though for different reasons. We look at immigration from the non-criminal end and say even non-criminal migrants should be restricted. He looks at immigration from the criminal end and says there should be no restriction at all. Incredibly he says:
“Suppose the crime rate for immigrants were triple that of native Americans. Since justice is not collective, that fact would not justify any interference with the flow of immigrants across our borders.”
He continues with an analogy between countries per above and neighborhoods:
“Would you ... [have] the police go to a poor neighborhood, where the crime rate is triple the average, and eject or imprison everyone?”
Mr. Binswanger swapped out the usual definition of sovereignty – freedom from external control, autonomy – for the one he invented in order to promote open borders. If foreigners can come in across the border at will then they are in control, not us, and we have lost our authentic sovereignty.
-oOo-
The man behind ObjectiveDissent.com, now defunct, sent this thoughtful comment:
The local Objectivist group was discussing Rand’s essay “Collectivized Rights” (in The Virtue of Selfishness) this morning and we had a 45-minute discussion of the very passage you cite, “A free nation ... has a right to its territorial integrity, its social system and its form of government.” What does Rand mean by “social system?” It cannot be synonymous with “government” or she would use the term “government.” It must mean something beyond government, something like what we might call “deep culture,” the cultural norms that guide human interactions short of government action. (Rand is not consistent on this though. In “Collectivized Ethics,” she defines society as “an organized political system.” Elsewhere in “Collectivized ‘Rights'” she defines society as “a group of men.”)
We need borders and a foreign policy (of which immigration policy is a part) precisely because the rest of the world is not just worse than America in a lot of respects, but also, different. If we imported 200 million rights-respecting Chinese to America, we’d become China 2.0. For some people that country may or may not be a decent place to live but it would not be America, which would be culturally and politically eradicated. My point about the right to a "social system” is that it is a right to a British-American social system including not just the government but also all the other things that go with it. We already have a Mexico, why must we acquiesce in making the U.S. Mexico 2.0? Or Honduras 2.0, or any 2.0? |
1 Blog entry of Harry Binswanger Letter, dated 6 November 2018. Since then he has split some paragraphs and made minor changes to the last paragraph, not quoted here.
2 “Collectivist Arizona Immigration Law is Anti-Capitalist” Capitalism Magazine 28 April 2012, objecting to Arizona senate bill 1070, then under review by the U.S. Supreme Court. Arizona’s bill would have allowed Arizona to enforce federal immigration law, which it wasn’t doing. The court struck down most of the law.
And in another article, “Open Immigration” pinned to Mr. Binswanger’s website, the version found January 2015, he explained how half the population of the world could come to America and we would be better off. (To repeat, with this guy you don’t need the reductio in reductio ad absurdum.) Not long after writing that essay he moved from New York City to a sparsely populated guard-gated whitopia community outside Naples, Florida. See his entry in Who’s Who on this website.
3 UPDATE: Vdare had to close down in 2025, a victim of leftist lawfare waged by Letitia James, the black attorney general of New York. Not a peep from Mr. Binswanger or anyone else at ARI about this egregious violation of free speech. (These attacks are made by finding some excuse however shabby to issue an organization subpoena after subpoena – no charge is necessary – saddling it with legal expenses until they face bankruptcy.)
4 He fails to address an obvious problem with his conclusion. The distinction of individual versus army is pointless. An army is composed of individuals. Outside the border each man could remove his uniform, then after Mr. Binswanger has welcomed a sufficient number of them into the USA, put them on again, Mr. Binswanger might reply that a foreign government is not allowed to do this, but by his own lights he cannot even try to prevent it. His argument, were it valid, leaves the USA completely undefended from foreign armies.
5 Leonard Peikoff once agreed, then quickly recanted. See Leonard Peikoff on Yaron Brook and Immigration on this website.
6 The Immigration Act of 1924 greatly restricted immigration, both as to numbers and country of origin. (The immigrants of the preceding decades were not the unalloyed blessing Mr. Binswanger makes out.) It lasted until the Hart-Celler Act rescinded it about forty years later, combined with a failure to support existing immigration law, which opened the floodgates.