The Ayn Rand Institute promotes unrestricted immigration in the name of individual rights. As one board member put it:  “The principle of individual rights demands open immigration.” [2]  But we ask:  What does open immigration accomplish in practice? Because if ARI’s alleged application of individual rights leads to the destruction of America, then the application must be wrong.

This is common sense, not – as a student of Objectivism might worry about – pragmatism. Pragmatism maintains that if something works in one case it’s true in that case, if it doesn’t work in another case it isn’t true in that case. What’s true is what works, from moment to moment and trial to trial, each trial isolated from the others. It is impossible, says the pragmatist, to generalize over cases or to organize such knowledge into a network of dependencies. The result of pragmatism is a mentally fractured view of the world.

This much however is correct: If something doesn’t work there was something wrong before it failed.

Toohey’s aphorism is the moral analog of the logical argument reductio ad absurdum.  If a proposition logically entails something obviously false, then the proposition must be false. [3]  If a policy leads to the triumph of evil, the policy must be evil.

The consequence of open borders is conquest by Third World immigration. Slowly, slowly and by degrees, like a cloud changing from a fox terrier into a gargoyle, America becomes another nation. As with the cloud, while looking at it you are unconscious of the continuous change. You enjoy the terrier for a while, look away and later look back, and the terrier is distorted almost beyond recognition; look away again and look back, and the terrier is gone.

We are losing our country. Whether to oppose the conquest or not is a question of self-defense. ARI writers speak of individual rights in an argument that leads to the end of historic America, ultimately to the destruction of you and yours. If selfishness is a virtue then ARI’s argument must be wrong somewhere. You aren’t obligated to examine it further.

Nonetheless we shall ignore Toohey’s advice – he exaggerates to make a point – and examine ARI’s folly in detail.

The Ayn Rand Institute launches a two pronged attack against this idea. They claim that a foreigner, whatever his character or your wishes, has a right to come into your country on his own initiative, that the very idea of “your country” is spurious, collectivist, and anti-capitalist. The country is not yours. You have no right, and your government has no right, to keep him out. A random Guatemalan, for example, has as much right to be here as you do. We shall call this the Foreign View claim.

Then, setting aside the rights of foreigners, there are the rights of citizens. ARI claims that a U.S. citizen has the right to import foreigners into the U.S., just as he does – we would say – sacks of corn. Neither you nor your government has a right to prevent him. Yaron Brook, for example, has the right to bring over a dozen willing Vietnamese. We shall call this the Citizen View claim.

The problem here is that once you place conditions on a foreigner’s entry, you acknowledge that he has no right to entry. The folks at ARI make the Foreign View claim and undermine it in the same breath.

Or rather most do. One ARI writer is consistent. Here is Harry Binswanger in an article objecting to Arizona senate bill 1070 (an attempt to curb illegal immigration into that state), then under review by the U.S. Supreme Court:

We would oppose open borders even if everyone on earth were perfectly healthy and uncriminous. Perhaps Mr. Binswanger had this in mind when writing:

Mr. Binswanger knows our preference – “our” being most Americans, especially working and middle class Americans [6] – yet he claims anyone has a natural right to come regardless.  He argues as follows:

Notice how he expands  entry into the U.S.  into all encompassing  “free movement.”  An immigration patriot doesn’t care about the foreigner’s movement outside the U.S.  His movement across our border into our country, that is the issue at hand.  Later Mr. Binswanger says:

From Sir Walter Scott’s poem “The Lay of the Last Minstrel”:

Mr. Binswanger takes the Foreign View claim to its logical conclusion in a talk to the Objectivist Club of New York University (December 12, 2005) titled  “The Case for Open Immigration: Why Immigration Is a Right.”  He claimed the U.S. is underpopulated – a rather hazy notion we would say – and to prove it he said the entire world could move to the U.S. with no problem, indeed it would benefit all of us.

Mr. Binswanger’s point was not that everyone on earth would take advantage of open borders but that any number could and everything would be all right, even better than before. Since in the event fewer would come, why worry?

How being peppered and shot through with a billion and a half Chinese – five per current American – would enrich your neighborhood is a question. And China is just the beginning. The arrival of the whole world would make 50 immigrants per current American.

The actual number who would come, though far less than everyone on earth, eventually would be huge. If in this manner the U.S. population swelled to eight times its current size – to choose a definite if arbitrary number – that would be seven immigrants for each current American. This may or may not be your idea of better than before.

However there are limits even for Mr. Binswanger. He went on to say he would want the migration – this massive influx of Chinese, Africans, Indians, South East Asians and so forth – to occur  gradually.

You can’t make this stuff up.  Mr. Binswanger is the walking absurdum of open borders advocacy.  We began by saying we would tie ARI’s argument to its consequences in the real world, and here Mr. Binswanger has done it for us. If the world is real to the people at ARI they must hate your guts.

Mr. Binswanger’s talk was reported in the news article “An Author Who Would Let the Whole World In” (New York Sun December 16, 2005). He expands his talk in the essay “Open Immigration” pinned to his website, updated and re-titled over the years. Since the Sun reporter might have been stoned during the talk or later at his desk writing about it, we now review Mr. Binswanger’s essay, the version found January 2015.

Again Mr. Binswanger recommends gradualism.  A full open immigration policy should come  “After a phase in period.”  Presumably this means fewer then fewer restrictions, a larger then larger monthly quota, until there are no restrictions and no quota, anyone and any number at any rate can come. As for the length of the phase-in period, he mentions a decade as an example. (In another article, “The Solution to Illegal Immigration,”  he says  “a 5- or 10-year period.”)

To those who worry about overcrowding, Mr. Binswanger claims that  “America is a vastly underpopulated country” (emphasis his)  and compares our current population density to that of France (about three times ours) and England (about eleven), as if those countries were a standard by which to judge population density.

He might ask a few Frenchmen or Englishmen what they think of their country’s population density or of immigration from the Third World. [8]

Mr. Binswanger writes, without qualification, that “high population density is a value.”  To demonstrate how underpopulated is America he considers  “a really extreme scenario”:  half the world moves to the continental United States. Again, his point is not that half the world would in fact move if we had open borders but that any number could and we would be better off than before. Apparently so well off that we could afford the multifold increase in the price of land but he doesn’t mention that consequence.

He says the  half-world  scenario would vastly increase the population density but it would be less – actually, we observe, only slightly less – than that of New Jersey today.

Let’s dwell on that for a moment. Imagine every state in the continental United States packed north, south, east and west with New Jerseys. The population density would be about 1,150 men per square mile of land, in each square mile of land (as an average) from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico; and each population of 1,150 men would consist almost entirely of Third World immigrants. According to Mr. Binswanger this is good.  This is good?

Population density per se is a comparatively minor issue. The real issue is demographics and culture. If open borders led to half the world moving here we – you and I and the other American citizens – would become less then four tenths of one percent of the total population, whites less than three tenths of one percent. In practice the influx would be less and so our percent more but for sure it would be miniscule. You are not supposed to notice, or at least not complain, for Mr. Binswanger writes, with official Objectivist righteousness:

Mr. Binswanger claims – in the above “Open Immigration” essay – that the typical immigrant is a better human being than the typical American (for brevity call native Americans simply Americans).  Welfare?  He claims that percentage-wise, fewer immigrants are on welfare than Americans. That is not true, [9]  especially if non-white Americans are excluded. Furthermore, he claims that an immigrant cannot legally go on welfare until after five years of residency – a barefaced lie. [10]  He disapproves of “left-leaning States, like California” which “continue to throw tax money at immigrants ... ”  Note his choice of the word “throw,” as if the immigrants did not eagerly catch the money.  Note that he doesn’t consider whether immigration has made California more or made it less left-leaning.  (The answer of course is more.)

Crime?  He says  “immigrants are less prone to crime than are native Americans” (emphasis his)  and proves it by comparing the murder rate of El Paso, a Texas border town, with that of Baltimore.

But why not compare El Paso with  Manchester, New Hampshire  or  Camden, Maine?  Baltimore has one of the highest per capita violent crime rates in the country, and Mr. Binswanger knows why.

He should have considered El Paso by itself and compared the crime rate of its white Americans with that of its immigrants.  Considering only the residents of El Paso last year, were the criminal Americans more numerous as a percent of Americans than the criminal immigrants as a percent of immigrants?

Finding the answer to the same question about Los Angeles, which like El Paso has a high percentage of immigrants, is easy:  glance at the city police department’s most wanted posters. [11]  Clearly most of the crime in Los Angeles is committed by immigrants, most as in almost all.

After bringing up crime rate Mr. Binswanger says that crime rate is irrelevant.  It is unjust, he says, to curtail the rights of foreigners who would immigrate because of the crimes of some existing immigrants. He says this, though, in a twisted way:  “it is a slap at morality to curtail the rights of all immigrants because of the crimes of a few individual immigrants.”  Curtail the rights of immigrants? Note the switch: he confuses foreigners with immigrants. By “the rights of all immigrants” he means the rights of all non-citizens, and again begs the question of rights. The non-citizen possesses no immigration right to curtail.

Has your neighborhood been ruined by Third World immigration?  Apparently Mr. Binswanger’s response would be:  If they really did ruin your neighborhood then they ought to be arrested and imprisoned for a period prescribed by law at your expense. Still, they had a right to come and have a right to stay. You must deal with your ruined neighborhood before they were imprisoned and after they are released, it’s not my concern, I’m only interested in morality. And, frankly, I’m afraid your neighborhood wasn’t ruined at all, you just don’t like being surrounded by Asians, Africans and Mediterranean types. [12]

Mr. Binswanger ends his essay with a rhapsody of praise for immigrants and an extended insult to Americans.  A few standout lines:

Mr. Binswanger concludes his essay with “a short list of some great immigrants ... .”  Are we allowed to notice that every one of them came from Europe? Every one in the 18th to early 20th century?

He insinuates that today’s immigration is like that of yesteryear, that there is no difference between the Somalia of today and the Scotland of the 19th century. Why does he pretend? He must know that today immigration means Third World immigration.  Memo from Yaron Brook to Harry Binswanger:  “For Pete’s sake Harry, revise your immigration article to include ... uh ... well, scrape up a few minorities even if they’re not so great. And ditch that made-up Norwegian friend “Klaus” and make him Raheem from Pakistan.  And about the half-world scenario, sure, we want to dilute the goyim so they won’t be able to stuff us in an oven but do you have to blab about it?”  OK, I made that up.

Listing a number of outstanding elements of a class might or might not reflect on the typical member of that class. Mr. Binswanger could just as well have made a list of immigrant mass murderers. [15]

Related to his pretense that immigration today is from Europe is his failing to mention differing standards of human physical beauty. (Reference his own Lexicon.) It is perfectly natural to prefer for your countrymen people of your own standard instead of people grotesque by that standard. “Minorities” view themselves by their own standard and will always want to bring in others like themselves. [15a]

First notice that it doesn’t say much. Unless somewhere there is a nation where the people sprang up out of the ground, every nation is a “nation of immigrants.” [16]  You might as well say  “We are a nation.”  or  “Our nation is a nation.”  It’s a vacuous statement.

Furthermore, the unqualified word  “immigrants”  in  “We are a nation of immigrants”  is misleading.  It’s like saying  “We are a nation of animals.”  Yes, but any kind of animal, any kind of immigrant?  The answer is that we are – or were before the leftists got control of U.S. immigration policy – a nation of Western immigrants. [17]

That’s better but still unsatisfactory. The Pilgrims were not immigrants of any kind. They came here to take over.  When they arrived there was no infrastructure, no government or social system – they started with nothing. Pushing aside any savage Indians that got in the way they created civilization out of wilderness. Instead of immigrants they were  settlers  or  colonists.

There was virtually no immigration from the Revolutionary War to the 1830’s – the population grew by natural increase, not by immigration – and virtually no non-northwest European immigration (except for slaves, unfortunately) until the late 19th century.

The following is our paraphrase of a satirical passage in Lawrence Auster’s essay “Huddled Clichés: Exposing the Fraudulent Arguments That Have Opened America’s Borders to the World”:

Better for us if Third Worlders were a nation of immigrants in their own nations.

Mr. Binswanger makes the Citizen View claim in passing in his “Open Immigration” essay.  Yaron Brook makes it the main point in his talk “Open Immigration Policy.” [18]

Mr. Brook spends the first minute or so dragging in Jefferson, Madison, Adams, and the Declaration of Independence as if the Founders would approve of the browning of America, and as if they hadn’t warned against immigrants who might  “bring with them the principles of the governments they leave, imbibed in their early youth” (Jefferson in Notes on the State of Virginia). [19]

Then Mr. Brook lays down Objectivist boilerplate about government and rights:

After more in the same vein he comes to the point:

Mr. Brook goes on to say that there are a few exceptions to the open borders idea. Americans do not in fact have the right to bring in foreigners:

Mr. Brook continues:

Mr. Brook then says having open borders is “good for the economy” and raises the standard of living for – he implies – everyone. It isn’t true, at least not with the Third World immigrants we have today. Though it might be good for the economy on average, if so it benefits “capital” (people who live primarily on interest from invested money) at the expense of “labor” (people who live primarily on a salary or wages). Of course some people are in both classes, either simultaneously or at different periods of their life. Still, on average over their life many people are predominantly one or the other, and with open borders capital wins and labor loses.

This is not to say there is anything wrong with capital per se, only that Mr. Brook is misleading his audience with his happy talk about the standard of living going up for all of us. Many Americans get the short end of the stick. [22]

Referring to a future time when we have the open borders policy he just described, Mr. Brook says it will be:

No talk boosting mass immigration would be complete without putting down Americans:

Then, without pointing it out, Mr. Brook switches from the Citizen View claim to the Foreign View claim we considered earlier. “Individual rights” now refers to the rights of foreigners. We’ve added a title to what he says next so it will be easy to reference in future. The title comes from the “anchor baby” analogy:  A woman crossing into the U.S. to give birth is like a ship dropping anchor: we get the ship as well as the anchor, permanently. [23]

Posters to Objectivist discussion groups sometimes lament that ARI writers feel they must pander to leftists, but that’s not what is happening. Outside the subject of economics, ARI writers are the leftists.

Mr. Brook winds down his talk telling us what to do about illegal immigrants. He says that a foreigner who crosses the border illegally is no worse than a citizen who took a drink during Prohibition. Along with opening the borders to future immigrants we should grant amnesty to foreigners now here illegally:

Mr. Brook concludes his talk (switching back to the Citizen View claim):  Beyond keeping out disease vectors etc, “state and federal government has no role in immigration.” He implies that limiting immigration, as was done before 1968 (when the Hart-Celler Act of 1965 went into effect), does not protect the lives of Americans. Notice, we sarcastically point out, how displacing Americans with millions of Third Worlders has protected their lives, not to mention their way of life. Notice how safe America has progressively become since 1968.

Thus ends this eyewash for students of ARI’s Objectivism.

Individual rights, individual rights !  You must give up your freedom and way of life for anyone from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, they have as much right to live here as you do !

According to Mr. Brook the principle of individual rights gives him the right “to pursue a ... course that I believe is good for my life.” Some of the goodnesses he has in mind are hiring labor at lower wages and renting out real estate at higher prices.

To obtain these benefits Mr. Brook would import Third Worlders. He believes that their influx and physical presence does not force you in any way. If Americans don’t like their country being turned into Brazil that’s too bad, they have no right to resist. Thus Mr. Brook twists the pursuit of happiness into America’s misery.

The claim that a foreigner has a right to move here, or that Yaron Brook and his ilk have a right to import him, negates the idea of a country, ultimately negates your vote, and makes a mockery of rights. Only self-sacrifice, on a colossal scale, could justify it.

A foreigner has no right to enter America. We don’t need a reason to exclude non-citizens, we may exclude them for any reason or no reason. By forbidding entry, or requiring conditions, we take nothing from them. Regarding a right to live here they have nothing for us to take.

The intellectual hucksters at ARI repeatedly insinuate that today’s immigrants are typically more freedom-loving than Americans. The exact opposite is true and exceptions do not disprove the overwhelming trend. Individual rights? ARI’s convoluted argument confronts simple reality: the massive immigration allowed today, which is not as massive as it would be with ARI’s totally open borders, is leading to the triumph of the left and ultimately to the end of any recognition of individual rights.

For all Binswanger and Brook’s hosannas to individual rights and the American spirit they don’t give a damn about rights or about America. With sophistical arguments and outright lies they and the others at ARI are leading their students down the garden path. That the students find themselves walking shoulder to shoulder with leftists should give them pause.

Race is a factor whether ARI likes it or not. Besides the relevance of differing standards of human physical beauty, most non-whites (immigrant and native) vote socialist and most whites do not. More victories for Obama-type politicians, and more “minority occupied governments,” are in store for us as the immigration disaster unfolds.

We are reaching the point of no return. When you find yourself in a hole the first thing to do is stop digging. We could at least stop making things worse by restricting immigration as we did before the Hart-Celler Act of 1965 went into effect. Or as a step in that direction institute a blanket moratorium on immigration. It would violate no one’s rights and it’s the selfish thing to do.

In the introduction we called the Ayn Rand Institute’s advocacy of open borders “ARI’s folly,” yet there must be a method to the madness.  How could a raft of untruths and specious arguments be an honest mistake?  Either ARI writers are lying outright, or they hypnotize themselves into believing their own lies which makes the lying more effective. Then the question is, why do they lie? What is the real reason behind their moral posturing and propaganda for open immigration?

One indication that ARI writers promote open immigration for reasons other than concern for individual rights is the precedence they give to open immigration over ending the injustices immigration makes worse. Today we have so-called civil rights laws and cannot always choose with whom we deal. We are forced to pay for many forms of welfare that others take advantage of. ARI pretends that this is irrelevant to the immigration debate. They do not say: first end the welfare state, end the violation of freedom of association, end affirmative action, etc then open the borders.  They say open the borders (even more than they are already) now, regardless of any bad laws.

Even a simultaneous phase-out of one and phase in of the other won’t satisfy them. The illegal immigrant must have amnesty now, you on the other hand can wait for your regulation and tax amnesty – except that because of the first amnesty your amnesty will never come.

Almost certainly ARI writers possess enough intelligence to know that with open borders welfare statism will expand, ending any hope of the libertarian future Objectivists like to envision. [26]

Another indication that ARI writers have something else in mind besides individual rights is that they promote open immigration for America but are content with Israel’s policy of restricted immigration.

ARI has an affiliate in Israel called the Ayn Rand Center Israel (ARCI), believe it or not. (Yaron Brook and Michael Berliner comprise its advisory board.)  Israel is not at war with Nigeria, Ethiopia, Algeria, China, Thailand ...  many countries. [27]  Does ARCI preach the virtues of vibrant Nigerian immigrants to the Israelis?

The heroism of pregnant Ethiopians as they struggle to cross the Israeli border?

That the principle of individual rights means Hop Wo Feng can move to Israel if he wants to?

The impossibility of patrolling the Israeli border anyway? [28]

Yet America gets the full monty.

Do we hear extreme scenarios about how half of Pakistan could move to Israel and Israel would be better than it ever was?

No.  America gets the Pakistanis and Israel gets the Jews.

And that is the point of ARI’s immigration propaganda:  America must not be allowed to be white.  America must be destroyed as a white nation. [29]

Just as open immigration would destroy Israel as Israel, the degree of open immigration we have had since 1968 is destroying America as America.

Israel is Mr. Brook’s home country. He frequently returns to visit and give talks about how Ayn Rand’s philosophy supports the Likud Party. It’s a sure bet he will never give his “Immigration Policy” talk there, with Israel in place of America, he’d be laughed off the stage.

He and ARI ought to be laughed out of Objectivism.