Peter Brimelow writes: a little bird suggests that the well-known
libertarian looney immigration enthusiast and
investment letter writer Mark
Skousen
might possibly metamorphosize into the head of FEE.
I’ve known Mark Skousen for years – I even blurbed
his book Scrooge
Investing.
(“Mark Skousen’s tenacious and hard-driving
personality is the wonder of the investment world,”
which he characteristically took as a compliment.)
And, with my usual forbearance, I tolerantly
featured him in my recent, rather depressing, FORBES
story
on the economic outlook from an Austrian perspective.
But Greg Pavlik’s classic February 1998 article,
reprinted from the late, great Rothbard-Rockwell Report by the kind permission of Lew
Rockwell
is a chilling inside look at Skousen as immigration
enthusiast in conspiratorial action
- complete with the trademark enthusiast
methodology of “anger,
evasion, lies, and insults…an emotional, as opposed
to an intellectual, commitment to mass immigration.”
I hope
Skousen gets FEE. For one thing, I presume he’ll
invite me to another debate, complete with FEEs.
(Sorry! Couldn’t resist!) More importantly, as
Trotsky said, worse is better.
Immigration policy is introducing a great and
irrepressible conflict into American political life.
Eventually all institutions will have to stand
up and be counted - and if necessary blamed.
By Greg Pavlik
VDARE’s
Libertarians and Immigration Archive
Strange things have been going on in the lily-white
town of Irvington-on-Hudson, New York. Don
Boudreaux,
the new president of the Foundation
for Economic Education, has made the venerable
institution an advocate of unrestricted third-world
immigration of all things. And this while it is being
projected that by the year 2050, people of European
descent (already a minority of 15% globally), will
become a minority in the United States.
Now is the time for asking hard questions about the
implications of this cataclysmic change, brought about
by our own government. As Ludwig von Mises reminded us,
liberty was the child of Western civilization and the
chief division between the high civilizations of East
and West: what separates us “is
first of all the fact that the peoples of the East never
conceived the idea of liberty.”
In 1927, as Ralph Raico points
out in the Spring 1996 issue of the The Journal of
Libertarian Studies, Mises dealt with the
peculiar problem of multi-racial immigration to
Australia. “Fears of whites being “reduced to a
minority in their own country,” he wrote, and thereby
being subjected to persecution by new arrivals from
China and Malaysia, are “justified.” Mises concluded
that such immigration can be tolerated provided there
are massive amounts of uninhabited land, no welfare or
government intervention, and separate local political
authorities for separate peoples. Even from Mise’s
perspective, then, the proper libertarian attitude
toward immigration (as versus free trade) depends in
part on time, place, and existing government policy.
But at the new FEE, these are not considerations.
Boudreaux began
the shift in the October 1997 “Notes from FEE,” a
message included in each issue of the Freeman.
He seeks to deal with an argument put forward by
Hans-Hermann Hoppe
(oddly, never identified) questioning the
left-libertarian line on unrestricted immigration. It is
not my intention to deal with Boudreaux’s arguments,
or lack thereof, in any depth; interested readers may
consult David Gordon’s excellent
commentary in the winter 1997 issue of The
Mises Review.
It’s worth mentioning, though, that the October
piece contains some odd claims: for example, that the
government may do nothing to restrict “speech” of
any kind on public property. To illustrate by example,
when I was a student at Penn, a nudist organization
demanded the right to walk around unclothed in public on
“free-speech” grounds. Is this ipso
facto their right? Must the public really endure a
man shouting obscenities at the top of his lungs in the
public square? A smelly bum in the children’s section
of the public library, as in the famous New
Jersey case? Panhandling on street corners? Or
someone setting off an air horn at a civic-center
symphony concert?
Worse than providing a weak argument, Boudreaux’s
piece was couched in ad hominem attacks on those whom he
criticizes for their views on immigration. Those “who
claim to be friends of liberty” include who? Murray
Rothbard, Ralph Raico, Hans Hoppe, John Hospers? Or Peter
Brimelow, who, I would wager, has done as much as
anyone to promote free markets through his Forbes
articles?
In discussions at FEE, Edmund Opitz, the last Grand
Old Man of the organization, expressed his own
opposition to current trends favoring massive
third-world immigration. Does he deserve to be mocked?
The Freeman had
a standing policy avoiding this type of thing, but
apparently the policy is suspended for immigration
enthusiasts.
Boudreaux also dedicated his December
1997 “Notes from FEE” to unrestricted
immigration. By Boudreaux’s own account, the
publication was flooded with responses to his initial
article, with only a single letter in agreement.
The second piece is extremely patronizing. Boudreaux
suggests that a hypothetical “Juan” seeking
employment in the United States is hurting no one and so
no discussion is necessary. In fact, he shows no concern
at all for the framework in which the abnormal human
condition of relative freedom is possible, while
advancing a policy recommendation that would, by any
objective measure, make the country much less free.
I was particularly interested in Boudreaux’s
articles as I was involved in a number of internal
discussions at FEE with respect to immigration policy.
While associate editor of the Freeman, I wrote favorably of immigration restrictions in the
magazine.
One thing that is true of FEE in the past: it was
never committed to an ideology of open borders. While I
was there, I gained consent from Hans F. Sennholz, then
president, to publish a favorable review of Brimelow’s
Alien Nation.
Sennholz’s own view, repeated on several occasions,
was that as long as the welfare state was intact,
lifting immigration quotas and barriers was beyond
consideration. This was also Milton
Friedman’s position.
I mention my former position at FEE for a reason.
Several times during my years in Irvington, there was an
effort to push the open-borders line through the Freeman
from a small number of writers associated with more
Jacobinical wings of the libertarian movement. The
September 1995 Freeman
was one of the few issues that ranked exceptional,
marred only by a dismissal
of Alien
Nation in
Mark Skousen’s
column.
The Skousen article was short and gave no indication
that he had read the book. Instead of dealing with any
issue of substance, he mentioned that he had debated
Brimelow and presented him with a replica of the Statue
of Liberty. Of course, the Statue of Liberty was a gift
of the French to symbolize both republican values and
the friendship between France and America, and its
actual name is Liberty Enlightening the World, a great
Old Right sentiment implying non-intervention. No one
thought of it as the statue of immigration [Click
here
for James Fulford on the Statue of Liberty Myth]
until the “wretched refuse” poem of the leftist Emma
Lazarus was affixed to its base.
The December 1995 issue, edited by Pete Boettke, an
economist then at NYU, had an article in favor of open
borders and an article opposed to the idea of open
borders by Tom Woods of Columbia University; a kind of
libertarian debate. In the same issue I had a review of
Brimelow’s book, where I endorsed the need for
restricting large-scale immigration from the third
world. Skousen went berserk. After calling FEE and
rudely haranguing me for nearly forty-five minutes (at
which time he accused me of personally attacking him by
praising another author’s book (!) and denounced
Brimelow and me as racists), he called Sennholz, in an
effort to strongarm Freeman
editorial policy and to get me fired. Skousen went
on to attack me, Woods, Boettke (who finally hung up on
Skousen), and book editor Bob Batemarco to a host of
others. That was my first insight into how the
immigration issue is handled by the open-borders crowd.
This was followed by some uncorrected errors in the Freeman.
The first that I recall explicitly occurred in the June
1996 issue, edited by Jim Powell of the Cato Institute.
Powell conducted an interview
with Paul Johnson and used leading questions and artful
editing to make it seem as though Johnson believed in
unrestricted immigration. But at almost the same time,
Johnson was arguing in the London Spectator that all
non-white immigration to Britain should be halted. He
upped the ante by suggesting that those already present
should be paid to leave the country. A noted libertarian
scholar wrote to the magazine pointing this out, but his
call for a correction was ignored.
In the December 1996 Freeman,
a biographical sketch
of Frank
Chodorov
was published by a young Catoite named Aaron Steelman.
In his article, Steelman makes a specific claim: “For
Chodorov, a noninterventionist foreign policy was
incompatible with protectionism or a restrictionist
stand on immigration…Noninterventionism, free trade,
and open borders belonged in the same package. To accept
one part of the package while rejecting the others was
not only to give in to the state, but to flirt with
nativism.” Steelman goes on to quote Chodorov against
protectionism, and to somehow suggest that Chodorov
really meant to be speaking about immigration.
What’s the problem here? Jeff Tucker of the Mises
Institute did a literature search of everything that
Chodorov wrote and could find nothing supporting “open
borders.” Instead,
he found that Chodorov specifically defended nativism as
a bulwark against war. More importantly, Chodorov
opposed the immigration of communists, on the grounds
that they would be subversive of conditions favorable to
liberty. This is precisely the argument made by many
libertarian critics of third-world immigration, just
crafted for different circumstances. While Chodorov may
have been sympathetic to old-time, go-slow immigration
(he wrote favorably of Irish and Jewish immigrants and
their assimilation into the market economy), his
opposition to communist immigration is incompatible with
an “open border.”
When Tucker sent a letter to the Freeman asking for a correction, nothing was done. Why? One of the
reasons may be the pattern of the immigration
enthusiasts: anger, evasion, lies, and insults. All the
markings of an emotional, as opposed to intellectual,
commitment to mass immigration.
It is more than sad to see FEE joined with the hard
left, which is not so naïve in its understanding of the
real effects of mass immigration since 1965. For years,
the left has promoted these immigration trends precisely
as a means of undermining the bourgeois foundations of
American liberty that it views as irredeemably corrupt.
To reiterate what even a casual observer knows: these
new arrivals from the third world generally vote for statist
policies and along ethnic
lines; agitate for entrenching
affirmative action; benefit from affirmative action
at others’ expense; back redistribution of all sorts;
commit crimes
disproportionate to their numbers; and add to the
welfare burden disproportionate to their numbers.
All of these are empirical facts that must be taken into
account, especially when considering the far-flung idea
of erasing the border altogether, which not even the
far-left dares suggest.
The libertarian Old Right, of which FEE was a part,
was never in favor of open borders as a matter of
policy. Immigration in general was simply not an issue.
During the period between the 1920s and the 1960s,
immigration was slowed considerably. The indexes of
various Old Right journals (including the Freeman)
show little in the way of commentary on immigration
in and of itself.
Why care about this particular case of open border
pushing? Well, consider George Nash’s suggestion in The
Conservative
Intellectual Movement in America
that at FEE “the quiet, almost obscure, and highly
individualistic origins of postwar libertarian
conservatism become apparent.”
And, of course, FEE served as a beacon when the
CIA-connected Buckley founded National
Review, whose destruction of the Old Right fit in
perfectly with the aims of the agency he so loyally
served. Contrast the Cold War fervor of NR
with Read’s opposition to the Korean War. (I
recommend the anti-war collection published by FEE under
Sennholz, Leviathan
at War, edited
by Opitz; it contains Read’s piece, “Conscience on
the Battlefield,” as well as some other great right
wing anti-war essays.)
Does the open-borders crusade mark a permanent break
from FEE’s roots in the Old Right? That would be a
shame. The FEE staff is great. The managing editor of
the Freeman, Beth
Hoffman, is one of the most decent persons I’ve known.
Bettina Bien Greaves, ever-knowledgeable Misesian and
wife of the late Percy Greaves, still maintains an
office at FEE. And, of course, what a legacy.
The tying of FEE to the National
Council of La Raza line on immigration must be
reconsidered, if only in the interests of the
organization’s own stated ideals.
Greg Pavlik was
Associate Editor of The Freeman and
he edited Forgotten Lessons: Selected Essays of John
T. Flynn (FEE,
1995).
E
mail Mark Skousen at mskousen@mskousen.com
August 24, 2001
