The people at the Ayn Rand Institute urge us to  “dismantle the entire bureaucracy of immigration restrictions.  Open the doors.  Let them in.” [1]  They deduce this from Ayn Rand’s philosophy by claiming that any restriction on immigration violates individual rights.

Further, they say that Rand herself agreed with them:  “she was a staunch defender of free speech and immigration ... .” [2]  Staunch as in watertight, steadfast, immovable.  Immigration as in unrestricted immigration.  Rand, they imply, believed foreigners have as much right to migrate across our border as you have to speak freely within it.

The collected essays of Ayn Rand fill nine volumes:  For the New Intellectual, The Virtue of Selfishness, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, The Romantic Manifesto, The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, Philosophy: Who Needs It, The Voice of Reason, and The Ayn Rand Column.  In all this work here is what she wrote about immigration:

You might think a staunch defender of something would have devoted a paragraph or two to defending it.  Undaunted, ARI combed through Rand’s unprepared remarks following her lectures, when she answered questions from the audience whether about the lecture or not. Out of all these impromptu Q&A,  ARI found one about immigration, from 1973. In it Rand defended open immigration. To an ARI writer this lonely  off-the-cuff  Q&A proves that she was a staunch defender of open immigration, which today, over forty years later, means mass Third World immigration.

ARI’s adjective staunch is inappropriate when all they can produce is this one instance, and from a Q&A period at that. [4]  Before we look at it in detail  first a general observation. Though confused is not an adjective one normally associates with Ayn Rand, sometimes what she said was less than clear, especially when spoken extemporaneously under time pressure or to a hostile audience. Indeed, sometimes what she said went beyond confused.

A few examples:

(1) At a time when the USSR and the USA had ICBMs pointed at each other’s cities Rand was asked how, in a war that Russia had started, she would “resolve the dilemma” of “murdering” Russians who opposed the Soviet leadership. Most of her answer is unobjectionable. She said the question incorrectly assumes that “an individual inside a country can be made secure from the social system under which he lives” but unfortunately she continued: “and which he accepts, willingly or unwillingly, even if he’s fighting it he still accepts, he hasn’t left the country.”  Apparently everyone has a choice and patriotism is out the window. Later, perhaps in response to some grumbling from the audience, she said: “... the Soviet citizens who are innocent, [here she becomes very intense] I hope someday will be destroyed  in a proper war along with the guilty. There aren’t very many innocent ones; and they’re not in the big cities, they’re mainly in concentration camps.”  ARI would have you believe Rand might as well have written this nonsense in an essay, and published it to the world and to posterity. [5](2) When asked what she thought of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Russian writer who had written exposés of the Soviet prison camp system and of the Soviet army in Germany during World War II – whatever his intellectual errors a brave man who helped bring down the Soviet Union though Rand didn’t live to see it – she excoriated him from beginning to end, nary a word of praise or gratitude for anything he had done. She said the rulers of the Soviet Union were better than he was. [6](3) When asked what she thought of the artwork of Maxfield Parrish, she replied with one word:  “Trash.” [7]

What Ayn Rand said in an informal oral reply, without corroboration in writing that she published, should be excluded from her corpus. However interesting and thought provoking it might be, it should not be considered part of her philosophy or an example of its application. She was a brilliant woman but at times even a genius can say, or even write, something ill-considered.  Rand was not infallible. [8]

This brings us to that lonely discovery of ARI’s:  Rand advocating mass Third World immigration – so they claim, while casting a discrete shadow over “mass Third World.”  Though what she said is not as bad as that, it is  awful.

The place and time was the Ford Hall Forum, Boston 1973. [9]  There is a gap in the published recording when the audience member asked his question. The moderator repeats the question in his own words:

About her last statement. Ayn Rand came to the U.S. legally in 1926, two years after passage of the Immigration Act of 1924 which restricted immigration even more severely than the Act of 1921 – and in those days immigration law was enforced. Her premise, that immigration was not restricted when she came here and later when she obtained citizenship, is simply not true.

Furthermore, she was wrong to insinuate that she would be a hypocrite to advocate restrictions on immigration. Prospective immigrants are not all equal, some are of higher quality than others. But even ignoring that fact consider an analogy. Suppose Rand were on a boat that is beginning to capsize from the weight of additional passengers. Even assuming that the new passengers are of the same quality as the ones already aboard, is she forbidden to point out that the boat is about to sink, and help pull up the ladder ?  Immigration is not a subjective issue or a question of personal context, it is a question of fact and truth. [10]

About the second paragraph of Rand’s answer.  The beginning is hard to follow: she says that one must not advocate laws that are in one’s self interest or use force in one’s self interest. She couldn’t have meant her concept of self-interest. All laws should be in one’s self-interest, correctly construed, and force is necessary at times to defend oneself. This is eminently rational. She goes on to explain. In so many words she says that restricting immigration is never in your authentic self-interest, that any restriction on immigration constitutes aggression against foreigners. Preventing a foreigner’s entry is not defensive force but the initiation of force.

To put it another way:  The questioner and his sympathizers are the bad guys, not the invading migrants they would keep out.  It is the same line sold by ARI and which we argue against elsewhere on this website. Contrary to both ARI and Ayn Rand, in unison for a change, illegal migrants are the ones initiating force. And today few of them are like us. Ayn Rand was wrong – very wrong – in this Q&A of yesteryear.

She doesn’t come right out and say that immigration law – and borders, and countries – ought to be abolished, which makes what she did say all the more confusing.

The effect of mass Third World immigration on standard of living, in the sense of income, is a side issue. Pleasant surroundings is more important than wealth. Regardless of economic considerations immigration should be severely restricted. [11] 

The questioner must be faulted for asking about standard of living (which Ayn Rand apparently took to mean wages and salary) instead of quality of life. The economy is the least of our worries. Unrestricted immigration is a tool of the left, and the left’s goal is far more comprehensive than merely economic destruction. The questioner may have realized this, despite the form of his question. Many people find it difficult to come right out and say culture and demography so they resort to referring to it in a roundabout way, implicitly. They speak of illegal immigration when they mean all immigration, they speak of our economy when they mean our culture, they speak of anything, anything except race.

It cannot be emphasized too strongly:  the left wants an open border not from any benevolent humanitarian motive. They want it in order to destroy our way of life, and they will use every moral sounding argument however specious to get you, the victim, to sanction it. [12]

In the first paragraph of her answer Rand accuses the questioner of ignorance, saying he doesn’t know her concept of self-interest. Even though Rand knew her own concept she failed to apply it correctly in the difficult case of immigration. To repeat, if she meant what she said, Ayn Rand was wrong.

America gave her succor, and she shows her gratitude by saying the hell with you. This, in effect, is what the Ayn Rand Institute would have you believe was her considered position.

Ayn Rand had the benefit of the Immigration Act of 1924 all her life here, from her arrival in 1926, to 1968 when it was repealed, to a dozen or so years beyond that before the consequence of its end became evident. When, four and a half decades ago, Ayn Rand answered that question about immigration, her experience was with European immigration, which then meant white immigration – and at a slow and measured rate. [13]

The Immigration Act of 1965 (passed that year but going into effect in 1968, part of the bogus civil rights movement of the insane sixties), along with a breakdown in the enforcement of what immigration law there was, started the flow of the Third World into America. In 1973, the year of the Q&A, the flow was but a trickle. A few years later the trickle had become a flood, but the effect was not easy to see until the late 1970s – for someone living in an upscale Manhattan apartment even later. Rand died in early 1982 having never experienced the effect of the pernicious nonsense she once uttered.

In that isolated and today anachronistic statement Rand was of the same ilk as the leftists she had criticized. She conceded the major premise of the enemy, that Somalis, Pakistanis, Siamese and whatnot are just us outside the border, in and out interchangeable, so let them in. Were we to take Rand’s  ad-lib  and  should-have-been ephemeral  Q&A as definitive, as her considered and final word, we would have to regard her as an enemy of us and of our country.  America, and indeed the entire Western world, finds itself in a disaster today because of such intellectuals of yesteryear. They had a good time living in a predominately white world pretending they were fighting on the side of virtue, and left us to deal with the consequences of their work.

However our point is that this isolated snap remark of Rand’s does not represent her considered and final thought.  It is not staunch, it is not immovable.  It – and her misplaced anger – should be buried along with her other mistakes. It does not belong in the Ayn Rand corpus. [14] [15]

You can be saddled with every single utterance of Ayn Rand, or you can think for yourself and draw your own conclusions. Few Objectivists romanticize tobacco, think a woman president out of bounds, or that the work of Maxfield Parrish is trash.

We have emphasized the shabby provenance and isolated nature of the Q&A that the Ayn Rand Institute waves around to get you to support your own destruction. But that is only frosting on our main point. If Ayn Rand had written five books of essays advocating open borders, her position would still be wrong. Whatever she might have claimed and argued, her core philosophy does not entail unrestricted immigration. Europe and America are drowning in the altruism of open borders, and in conjunction with historical and cultural facts it is precisely her philosophy which proves the evil of it.

So much for the essays (nothing) and the Q&A (one problematic outlier). What of the novels and other fictional works?  Sometimes Rand’s characters make speeches that are equivalent to essays. (She collected the longer ones in For the New Intellectual.) In all the novels no one gives an immigration speech. [16]  Praise for flooding the U.S. with Asians, Africans and Amerindians is noticeably absent.

Were any of her characters themselves immigrants?  Setting aside the Soviet agent in the play Think Twice, only two major characters are described as foreign born, both in Atlas Shrugged:  Ragnar Danneskjold, from Norway (his description would do justice to a Norse god), and Francisco d’Anconia, from Argentina.

Ah ha !  A Third World immigrant – at least a resident visa holder – and a hispanic to boot, maybe even a mestizo!  Well no, not a mestizo.  The trouble for cultural leftists is that Rand goes out of her way to make Francisco white:  “Nobody described his appearance as Latin, yet the word applied to him, not in its present, but in its original sense, not pertaining to Spain, but to ancient Rome. ... [She begins to describe an ancient Roman’s appearance, using such words as “gauntness.”] His features had the fine precision of sculpture. His hair was black and straight, swept back. The suntan of his skin intensified the startling color of his eyes: they were a pure, clear blue.” Not exactly your typical hispanic. Not even Telemundo could pull it off. [17]

Speaking of appearances, the eyes of Rand’s heroes and heroines run to blue, cobalt, green, and gray;  the hair to blond, gold, red and chestnut. Doubtless this was a clever ruse by a master propagandist to get the reader to accept the browning of the West.  Hey, it’s just a suntan.  I’m being sarcastic.

Rand took for granted the European sense of human physical beauty. The setting of Atlas Shrugged is an idealized version of America as it had been when Rand composed the novel in the 1940s and 50s, projected into a dystopian future of indefinite date. Cultural leftists sneer at the story for its anglo-saxon atmosphere, which they disparage by an acronym spelling an obnoxious insect and whose adjectival form means petulant. The initial W originally stood for wealthy, now it’s redundant. The final P stood for Protestant, now it’s a vestigial tail. When a cultural leftist says WASP what he hates is whites, rich or poor, Protestant or whatever, just so they aren’t Jews. [18]

So much for the novels:  no immigration speeches, and a background that immigration enthusiasts such as Tim Wise hopes will disappear completely and forever.

We mentioned the Immigration Act of 1965, written by Norbert Schlei, introduced into Congress by Emanuel Celler and Philip Hart, championed by Edward Kennedy, and signed into law by Lyndon Johnson – committed, extreme leftists every one. Ayn Rand was publishing The Objectivist Newsletter during congressional debate over the bill. What did she or the other newsletter writers have to say about it?

Again nothing.  Rand was silent during this epochal moment in American history.

The restrictive Immigration Act of 1924 had been a “bottom up” affair, created by popular demand. The Act of 1965 that rescinded it (in 1968) was “top down” – created by a leftist elite and foisted on the public by a bought and paid for Congress. During the debate the leftists outdid themselves lying about the nature and consequences of the bill.  Kennedy assured us that:

Rand might have been taken in by the lies and so thought the bill unimportant. Another possible reason for her silence, a more likely one, is that, because she had surrounded and insulated herself with people no better than Leonard Peikoff, she was intentionally un- or mis-informed about the bill. Or she may have liked the bill – at last the gates of Vienna shall be opened – but was unwilling to defend it publicly.

Heaps of opprobrium on Rand for letting this moment pass without warning or comment.  This guardian of our culture was asleep on the job.

Suppose in 1926 circumstances had been different. Suppose in this alternate universe Rand is not allowed into the U.S, or is forced to return to England and then to Russia. Harry Binswanger and others at ARI make the following argument: We must accommodate the combined masses of Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Mexico, Central and South America in order to save Ayn Rand. With that cockamamie argument our country would perish and we along with it, including any Ayn Rands.

In this alternate universe, what of Rand’s (then) probably nonexistent contribution to philosophy? Though she was the most eloquent, thorough and consistent, others had pointed out the moral superiority of capitalism and the virtue of selfishness properly construed.  Philosophy is not invention, it is discovery. The cult of personality so evident at the Ayn Rand Institute – look at their website – would have you believe that truth is wedded to her person rather than to the objective world.

If Objectivism meant cultural leftist propaganda, which is what the Ayn Rand Institute wants you to believe, better for us if Ayn Rand had been kept out of the country. We can recover from  “the New Deal,”  “the Great Society,”  “the War on Poverty,”  “the War on Terrorism,”  we will never recover from being overwhelmed and replaced.

The leftists are finally winning by a War on Historic America waged by occupation. The loudest of the cheerleaders for this conquest by immigration are at the self-styled “Ayn Rand Institute.”  From the cataract of ideas and eloquence produced by Ayn Rand over her career these hucksters grub a few poisonous words and push them for all they’re worth.