KOL258 | Liberty Forum Debate vs. Daniel Garza: Immigration Reform: Open Borders or Build the Wall?

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 258. This is my debate at New Hampshire Liberty Forum, Feb. 7, 2019—really more of a roundtable discussion of immigration policy from a libertarian perspective. The other panelist was Daniel Garza, President of the LIBRE Initiative, and the moderator was Jeremy Kaufman. Some listeners may be surprised at my pro-immigration comments. Transcript below. https://youtu.be/9OWKh3yTyJ8 Recorded on my iPhone. I'll upload a higher quality version later, if it becomes available. Related links: I’m Pro-Immigration and Pro-Open Borders Switzerland, Immigration, Hoppe, Raico, Callahan KOL160 | Bad Quaker on IP, Hoppe, and Immigration Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s “Immigration And Libertarianism” at Lew Rockwell My article  Simple Libertarian Argument Against Unrestricted Immigration and Open Borders TRANSCRIPT Liberty Forum Debate vs. Daniel Garza: Immigration Reform: Open Borders or Build the Wall? by Stephan Kinsella, Daniel Garza, and Jeremy Kaufman New Hampshire Liberty Forum, Manchester, NH (Feb. 7, 2019) 00:00:01 M: … something that we’ll find out through the course of this.  Speaking tonight are, on my left-hand side, depicted by the convenient net placard I have in front of me, is Stephan Kinsella.  You’re not talking to me, all right.  Stephan Kinsella who is a patent attorney and leading libertarian legal theorist, the founder and director of the Center of the Study of Innovative Freedom and the Libertarian Papers.  He’s a former adjunct professor at the South Texas College of Law.  He’s published numerous articles and books in IP law, international law, and the application of libertarian principles to legal topics.  You can give a hand for him if you want. 00:00:46 [clapping] 00:00:52 On my right, your left, Daniel Garza, president of the LIBRE Initiative.  I have a very lot to say about him, but he’s asked me not to say all of it.  So I will say that he held a couple of important positions for the Bush administration in the early 2000s, has also done important things for the Hispanic community for Televisa and Univision and is currently, as I already said, president of the LIBRE Initiative, lives in Mission, Texas with his wife and three children.  Daniel Garza. 00:01:22 [clapping] 00:01:27 Moderating this will be Jeffrey Kaufman.  I don’t have a bio written for him.  I’m going to let you listen to him talk about himself and then field your questions.  There is – for anyone who wants to participate in this, Jeffrey will give you the opportunity to do so.  There’s a microphone at the back there, so that the panelists can hear you.  Just find me back there, and I will let you speak, and thank you for coming.  Thank you everybody.  Off to you, Jeff. 00:01:52 [clapping] 00:01:57 JEFFREY KAUFMAN: Thank you.  And I actually, since I see my purpose as moderator to be facilitating discussion and this has very little to do with me, I’m going to tell you nothing about myself, so we’ll just let that mystery remain.  So my purpose is to facilitate these guys talking.  This will – if I’m doing my job right, this will be the longest I talk in sequence for the entire night.  I do my job to be making sure that they’re answering the questions that are asked.  I am going to be trying to find areas of disagreement, so if there’s too much consensus, I’ll hopefully try to rile them up a little bit, and my job is to ask hard questions.  There will also be, depending on how good my questions go, either some or a substantial amount of Q&A time from the audience. 00:02:37 So if you – as you’re listening to this, if you have questions, make a mental note of them, and there will be time to ask them at the end.  That said, this – while this is a debate, it is not going to be a debate with a fixed resolution, so it’s going to be somewhat of a discussion aspect, although we will be seeking to find the areas of disagreement between our two speakers. 00:03:02 So what I want to start with actually – oh, sorry.  One more premise.  It’s – when we have these debates, a common tension in libertarian communities is the debate between the pragmatics of what we’re doing today, what we ought to do today in the world we live in today, and sort of what’s compatible with libertarian theory and anarcho-capitalist utopia or whatever you think the world ought to be.  And so it’s important both with our speakers when we’re asking questions if you could differentiate between what we think about what should be done today, or are we talking about what should be – how things should be in our ideal world.  So I’m going to start just by asking our speakers to just lay out your position on open borders, and we’re going to start with open borders in the world today.  So please lay out your position for open borders in the world today, for or against.  And we’ll start with Daniel. 00:04:01 DANIEL GARZA: So at the LIBRE Initiative, we take a very pragmatic actually approach to immigration given the realities of the world, given the realities of sometimes the overt statism that we live under.  It’s – I think it’s essential to look at the immigration debate in three components.  It has to do with family, integration of family and keeping the cohesiveness of families, and it has to do with humanitarian issues that are involved in the integration issues. 00:04:38 In that entire space, there are needs I think that are being driven or being imposed upon us that are humanitarian, and that is, I think, an important factor that can never be lost in this whole debate, things like refugees, people fleeing, economic conditions, political conditions, sometimes things that people have to endure because of – in the criminal space or criminal dimension I think is something that is tragic, and I think America has to be considerate of that. 00:05:19 And then for, I would say, if not most important, it’s probably critical is market demand like for market forces, to address market forces, to their – we believe in sort of a market-based immigration approach, so not so much open borders as much as I think it has to be – and I’m not talking about this sort of [indiscernible_00:05:52] where we decide the quota of – where the market demand is now.  But what I’m talking about – and [indiscernible_00:06:02] really important.  This whole discussion lately currently that we’re having on merit-based, switching [indiscernible_00:06:09] forward to merit-based.  I have issues with that as a person who believes strongly in individual freedom and spontaneous border.  Over 200 million immigrants have come to America in – through the arc of history, more than 200 million, and they made America strong, and they made America rich. 00:06:30 W: They made it great one might say. 00:06:32 DANIEL GARZA: I’m sorry? 00:06:33 W: I said it made it great one might say. 00:06:35 DANIEL GARZA: It made it great.  Absolutely it did.  Immigrants have made America great, and so what was important – an important part of the discussion is immigrants have always known how to fill market demand.  They developed any skills that they needed to fill market demand or leverage their own talents, their vast capacities to fill market demand.  And central planners didn’t have to tell us how many engineers we needed or how many doctors or mathematicians or whatever, and so I resist that. 00:07:11 So I’m open borders in the sense that I don’t think we should categorize the kind of immigrants that come in.  Immigrants are creating wealth for themselves and wealth for Americans, always have, always will.  They complement the American labor force, which is the greatest labor force in the world as far as I’m concerned.  And I think there’s – that we should honor that with the kind of immigration policies that we have.  So I guess what I’m saying is a smart, flexible system that accommodates for flows of – future flows of immigrants that – where we address family connections, humanitarian issues, and then also in market demand, which is smart, smart policy. 00:08:07 JEFFREY KAUFMAN: Thank you, Daniel.  And Stephan, your position on open borders in the world today [indiscernible_00:08:14]. 00:08:15 STEPHAN KINSELLA: Right.  So from my point of view, I think the consistent libertarian is a libertarian because we’re against aggression, going back to basics, which means that if you’re consistent, you’re against the state because the state is the agency of institutionalized aggression.  So, in other words, you have to be an anarchist libertarian to be a real libertarian, which is what I am, so that’s how I think about these issues. 00:08:48 So when these issues arise, we live in a non-free society.  We live in a state-dominated society.  So our only question is it’s either one of theory or it’s one of practice.  What would the world look like in a free society?  And what policies should we support now by the government, which is not libertarian and can’t be libertarian?  Everything the state does is a criminal act, so in a sense we real libertarians oppose everything the state does.  But the question comes down to what policy should be support now? 00:09:26 But we have to first recognize that that policy is not the ultimate policy because the ultimate policy is for the state to commit suicide or whatever the word in Latin would be for the state to kill itself, to disband.  Anything they do short of that is not going to be the optimal solution.  Given that the state exists, there will be losers of any state policy. 00:09:51 And this is one thing I think that open borders advocates, which I think I will come around to arguing for in a sense, but open borders advocates among libertarians don’t want to admit this.  They don’t want to admit that there’s really a choice, that we’re libertarians.  We’re against the state.