An academic once said “My right to freedom of movement does not entitle me to enter your house without your permission… so why think that this right gives me a valid claim to enter a foreign country without that country’s permission?” We saw in the previous chapter that a country is not like a private club. We’ll see in this chapter that a country is also not like a house: a government doesn’t have the right to do with a country what a homeowner has the right to do with their house. The law professor Ilya Somin wrote an article about the important ways in which a country differs from a house. The article, called Why a nation is not like a house or a club – and why the difference matters for debates over immigration, was published on the Washington Post website in August 2017. In fact it’s this article which contains the quote by the academic found at the beginning of this paragraph. Since we saw in the previous chapter why a country is not like a private club, in this chapter we’ll focus on the part of Somin’s article that explains why a country is not like a house.
First we must understand the concept of private property rights. Let’s use a house as an example. If I’m the owner of a house and I have full private property rights, then I’m the person who decides how to use the house. I can decide to live in the house myself, or to rent it out to someone, or to sell it. If I rent out the house, I can decide who to rent it to. If I live in the house, I can decide who can and who can’t come in. I can tell someone that they can’t come in even if I don’t have a very good reason. Private property rights protect my house from confiscation by the government. (Actually, it turns out that private property rights are pretty important in economics. Some economists have found that private property rights are important for long-term growth. Others describe private property rights as the key to economic development.)
Somin describes the argument that a country is like a house like this:
As a homeowner, I generally have the right to exclude whoever I want from my property. I don’t even have to have a good justification for the exclusion. I can choose to bar you from my home for virtually any reason I want, or even just no reason at all.
There’s nothing controversial about this. Everyone agrees that a homeowner has the right to exclude anyone they like from their house. According to the argument that a country is like a house:
[A government] has the right to bar foreigners from its land for almost any reason it wants, or perhaps even for no reason at all. All it is doing is exercising its property rights, much like the homeowner who bars strangers from entering her house.
The argument simply says that a government is the owner of the country in the same way the homeowner is the owner of the house. The government has rights over the country in the same way the homeowner has rights over the house.
It might seem on the surface that this is an argument which gives importance to property rights. But, if you think about it a little, you can see that the argument actually undermines private property rights. Let me explain this with the help of an example. Suppose that there’s a neighborhood made up of ten houses, owned by ten different people. Suppose that eight of the ten vote to keep out some foreigners. The remaining two vote to allow the foreigners into the neighborhood, because they want to rent their houses to the foreigners.
Let’s compare the situation where the foreigners are free to enter the neighborhood (open borders) to the situation where the foreigners aren’t allowed to enter (immigration restrictions). If there are open borders, the eight homeowners who voted to exclude the foreigners are free to exclude the foreigners from their own homes, and the two homeowners who voted to allow the foreigners into the neighborhood are free to rent their houses to the foreigners. If there are immigration restrictions, the eight homeowners who voted to exclude the foreigners from the neighborhood must exclude the foreigners from their homes (because the foreigners aren’t allowed into the neighborhood), and the two homeowners who voted to allow the foreigners into the neighborhood must also exclude the foreigners, against their wishes. Only open borders is consistent with private property rights for both types of homeowners. Immigration restrictions are consistent only with the private property rights of the homeowners who voted to exclude the foreigners from the neighborhood; they violate the private property rights of the homeowners who wanted to rent their houses to the foreigners.
We have seen that immigration restrictions have undermined the private property rights of the two homeowners who wanted to rent their houses to the foreigners, while open borders has no effect on the private property rights of the homeowners who wanted to keep out the foreigners. There is another reason why a country is not like a house. If I own a house, then I can decide that only Muslim prayer will be allowed in the house, or that the only political speech that’s allowed is speech that supports the Republican Party. If the government could behave in the same way, then it could ban all prayer except for Muslim prayer, or ban all political speech except speech that supports the Republican Party. This would violate all sorts of rights.
If we want to respect private property rights, and we don’t want a government to exercise enormous power over the people who live in the country, then we cannot say that a country is like a house, and we cannot support immigration restrictions.
Questions
- Why are private property rights important?
- How are immigration restrictions inconsistent with property rights for all?