7. Free Immigration
It is necessary to address the issue of free immigration,
which is closely related to the subject of population growth.
This section will show that free immigration is in the
long-run material self-interest of the citizens of a
capitalist country.
The words capitalist country must be stressed. To
the extent that a country has a welfare system, tax-supported
hospitals and schools, public housing, and so on, and the
immigrants come to take advantage of these offerings, the
effect is a corresponding loss to the present inhabitants of
the country, who have to pay the costs. The above proposition
applies to a country insofar as it is without these and
other welfare-state-type programs—a country in which the
immigrants must be self-supporting and themselves pay for
whatever they receive. By the same token, the freedom of a
country implies the absence of economic disabilities imposed
on immigrants: there are no minimum-wage laws or pro-union
legislation to prevent them from gaining employment, and no
legal obstacles to their starting businesses, buying land, and
so on.
Under such conditions, the freedom of immigration must
ultimately prove economically beneficial to everyone. Because
among the immigrants and their descendants will be individuals
of great talent, capable of achieving great things in a free
country, but who would be stifled and be able to contribute
little or nothing in the lands of their origin. In effect, the
freedom of immigration into a free country from countries that
are less free or unfree is a vital means of unlocking human
talent and increasing the gains from the pyramid of ability.
As a simple example, one should consider what would have
been the effect on Andrew Carnegie, and not just on the
American but on the world steel industry, if he had been
prevented from immigrating to the United States and confined
to the less free environment of Scotland and Great Britain.
One should consider what would have been the effect on the
development of the helicopter if Sikorsky had been prevented
from immigrating to the United States from Russia. Is it
likely that the Russians would have seen the value of his
ideas before they had been proved by actual repeated
demonstration in the United States?
Indeed, we should consider the effects if the ancestors of
any American industrial innovator had had to remain in their
native lands, and thus that person have been born and spent
his life in a country like Italy, Poland, Russia, or Germany,
or even France or Great Britain, instead of the United States.
Probably most of the innovators would have been stifled or at
least significantly held back.
The historical advantage noted in the previous section, of
the people of the United States having access to more business
talent than the people of any European country, was due to
America’s policy of greater economic freedom in general
combined with her policy of free immigration in particular.
The latter gave the United States a larger population from
which to draw such talent, while the former ensured that in
the larger population a greater frequency of such talent
would be manifested, because freedom is the essential
condition for the development and flowering of such talent.
The combination of free immigration and general economic
freedom thus results both in more people and, at the
same time, as an inextricable part of the same process, a
rate of economic progress that is not only rapid, but also
further accelerated by virtue of the immigration. Simply
put, free immigration into a free country accelerates economic
progress, because talent requires freedom in order to
flourish. Free immigration into a free country brings talent
to freedom, and so enables more of it to develop and
contribute to economic progress. The acceleration of
economic progress it achieves ultimately far outstrips
whatever short-run problems may accompany an increase in
immigration. |
