In Defense of Voluntary Immigration

In a world with solely private property, to move from one piece of land to another you would need the permission from the landowner to move to it, or through it. Therefore all labour movements-immigration and emigration- would obviously be voluntary or invasionary. With all labour movements voluntary the market would provide the optimal amount of immigration. Some areas would allow people from many different cultures into their areas, such as cities, while others would attempt to maintain an ethno-cultural homogeneity.

Now with public land immigration is not voluntary; it becomes forced intergration since immigrants enter areas without consent by using public parks and especially public roads. They can thus skip from one place to the other and infringing on property rights. These "public" lands are not state owned but owned by the net taxpayers. So in essence the UK is a sort of forced residential golf club. Nobody else has any right to be there unless they are invited or buy one plot of the Golf club- buying real estate- and since they latter needs to parties to agree then this is invited immigration. In the former case however the immigrant would have signed in the guest book and because I was willing to take him in I would have to take responsibility of him for wages, housing and crime: if he smashed up the club house I would be responsible because I was the one who invited him in; this does not however preclude me then taking legal action against my guest.

With free trade both parties invite reciprocally the trade and bear the costs of their actions. With immigration this does not happen and the only way to make it comparable to it is to introduce the Hoppeian pass system: a current resident issues a pass to a foreigner without which they would not be allowed entrance; this would detail the length of stay and would guarantee that I the inviter would bear the full costs of the immigrant.

This would entail that any immigrant who could not acquire a pass from a resident would have to be deported to their country of origin. This is the only way, in the presence of public land, to make immigration voluntary. This is though a second best solution. The optimal solution is to give the public property back to the owners (probably via shares in a newly created firm) and return to a fully private property society where everything would be voluntary; where it is not sanctions would be imposed against the trespassers. This is in stark contrast to today where the state, an inherent rights violator (see Anarchy is Not Chaos post below) imposes sanctions on innocents who refuse to pay them tribute.