It’s a nice homey analogy but it is wrong on multiple levels. As I pointed out in my reply, the author has apparently never looked at the back of his toaster. If he did he would have noticed that what actually assures him that his toaster won’t explode is not the regulatory power of the federal (or any) government, but the competition in the private sector. Specifically most small appliances in the United States have the stamp of quality assurance from Underwriters Laboratory (UL), which is a private (nonprofit) organization that has tested such appliances for over a hundred years. UL is unaffiliated with the government and provides this quality assurance so manufacturers can to say to their customers that their toasters or clock radios or televisions are safe.

Not the Only One

UL is not the only organization that provides this service, though it is very much the largest. In other sectors of the economy similar groups provide market-produced quality assurance. For example, since 1972 auto repair technicians can be certified by the National Institute for Automotive Service Excellence (ASE). ASE requires that technicians pass a series of tests to get certified; customers are informed by a wall display at the repair shop. Like UL, ASE is a nonprofit that is independent of government. The Professional Association of Diving Instructors (PADI) certifies scuba divers in a similar, though for-profit, fashion.

What’s great about these organizations is that they emerged from the demands of both consumers and producers, not government. Consumers want a way of knowing that they are getting products that won’t explode, mechanics who know their stuff, and scuba instructors who won’t get them killed (not to mention gear that won’t leak). Sellers want to be able to signal to potential buyers that their products and services are of high quality. Solving this problem requires an independent intermediary such as these certification organizations, and sellers are glad to pay to acquire the signal of certification. The certifiers are happy to provide it, and most (though not all) are run as private nonprofits to alleviate any concern about conflicts of interest.

What is also important here is that there is genuine competition via freedom of entry into the certification business. Certification organizations cannot afford to make mistakes since there’s nothing preventing either an existing competitor or new entrant from offering a higher quality alternative. Even if there is no actual competitor at any given time, the threat of competition via new entrants, and consumers’ and sellers’ option to “exit” and use that new firm, keep established certifiers on their toes.

So contrary to the letter writer, it’s not the federal government which helps to assure that his toaster won’t explode, but the competitive forces of the market.

How’s Government Doing?

However, that is only one problem with the argument. It’s also worth asking how well government has done at “certifying” financial products. One of the fascinating questions in the financial crisis is why all those toxic mortgage-backed securities got AAA ratings from Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s, and Fitch? The answer is that starting in 2003, those were the only three agencies allowed by the Securities and Exchange Commission to rate certain types of securities for regulatory purposes. This included many of the mortgage-backed securities that were at the center of the financial crisis.

In other words, the government’s quality assurance providers were a protected cartel (though the law has changed since the crisis). Without freedom of entry — and the threat of competition — these three firms faced reduced incentives to do their job well. More important, without the competitive pressure and the possibility of buyers and sellers exiting to other firms, the discovery process of competition was cut short, preventing the agencies from learning they were making mistakes and how they might do better. The agencies wound up stamping assets “AAA” that were the financial equivalent of an exploding toaster.

The lesson is that  if we want our financial system to be as reliable as our toasters, we need more market competition and less of the heavy hand of the State.

Careless language (or, even worse, verbal legerdemain) often turns words or phrases with positive connotations into Trojan horses that sneak mistaken, vague, or confusing notions into our thought processes.

A familiar example is the word “fair.” By definition, “fair” denotes something desirable. So by attaching the word to any noun or verb, a speaker anoints the thing as something good. The speaker is subtly instructing the listener simply to accept without question that the thing described by the word is good. A careless listener, then, is at high risk of accepting a conclusion that, with careful thought or without having heard the word “fair,” he might not accept.

Consider the frequently heard phrase “fair wage.” If Sen. Jones explains his support for raising the legislated minimum wage, he’s sure to insist that his goal is for low-skilled workers to receive a “fair wage.” Scholars seeking to explain the consequences of minimum-wage legislation objectively then have to overcome the emotional bias that the word “fair” smuggles into the conversation.

Another example is the phrase “secure our borders.” Opponents of open immigration frequently allege that illegal immigrants are proof that America’s borders aren’t “secure” and that those of us who wish to abolish numerical limits on immigration are insensitive to the need for government to “secure our borders.”

Such allegations, however, sneak in so many implicit presumptions that rational discussion becomes quite difficult.

The very phrase “insecure borders” conjures an image of government failing at its most fundamental responsibility—namely, protecting citizens from invading marauders. People see in their minds’ eyes an America increasingly at risk of being conquered by foreigners, leaving Americans at the mercy of invading rapists, plunderers, and murderers.

Immigrants, however, aren’t invaders, much less warriors in a conquering army.

Reasonable people can disagree over what kinds of national-security protections should exist on America’s borders and what sorts of screening of would-be immigrants should be done to reduce the risks of terrorist attacks on American soil. But it is not reasonable to imply that immigration is chiefly, or even mostly, an issue of national security. Unfortunately, such an unreasonable implication is precisely what people who frame immigration as a matter of border security sneak into the discussion.

For perspective, ask if America’s borders were insecure until 1921 when, with the Emergency Quota Act, Uncle Sam first began seriously to restrict the number of immigrants allowed into the United States. Were Americans, until just 90 years ago, living in peril of their lives and livelihoods because U.S. borders were “insecure”?

Or ask this question: Does the fact that Uncle Sam imposes no numerical limits on foreign visitors to the United States mean that American borders are insecure? Short of the U.S. government’s imposing draconian restrictions (to be enforced with draconian measures) on visitors—say, admitting only 1,000 visitors annually, each of whom must first get a high-security clearance from the State Department—it’s almost impossible to see how numerical restrictions on foreign visitors would make America’s borders more secure. Therefore, anyone who would now seriously suggest that the lack of numerical restrictions on foreign visitors to America is evidence that U.S. borders are “insecure” or “broken” would justifiably be ridiculed.

Keep these points in mind when you encounter debates over immigration policy.

My proposal is to return to the policies under which anyone who wanted to immigrate to America could do so as long as he or she had no serious communicable disease and was not a terrorist.

That policy was much like the one we have today for foreign visitors to the United States: Anyone may visit America as long as he or she likely poses no serious threat to Americans. So, too, before 1882 anyone could immigrate to America as long as he or she posed no serious threat to Americans. (This policy actually continued largely unchanged until 1921, with the horrid exception of would-be immigrants from China. Starting in 1882 Uncle Sam imposed severe restrictions on Chinese people’s ability to immigrate into America.)

In fact, the security of American borders—if by this phrase we mean genuinely decreased risks to Americans’ persons and property—would almost certainly rise with open borders.

Points of immigrants’ entry, such as Ellis Island, would be reestablished. All peaceful persons immigrating to America would flow in through these points, be checked for communicable diseases and for ties to terrorist organizations, and, if cleared on both fronts, enter the United States. Uncle Sam would no longer spend hundreds of millions of dollars policing the borders, catching “illegal” immigrants, deporting them back to Mexico, and monitoring employers who might have hired “illegal” immigrants. Those resources could be used instead to seek out and to apprehend terrorists.

Because all legitimate steps to secure the borders would aim only at reducing Americans’ risk of being violated in their persons and property, government’s policing efforts would—with the open-borders regime I recommend—focus on this goal. Such worthy efforts would not get mixed in with, or be confused with, efforts to prevent peaceful people from coming to America and finding gainful employment here.

With government enforcement efforts concentrated on securing us from criminal violence and theft, we would be more secure than we are now with so many resources and so much manpower instead concentrated on “protecting” us from people whose only crime is to seek out better economic opportunities.

We can assume it fell short since the federal government is ever incompetent and has been tight-lipped about how many miles it has completed.

More people cross this international boundary each year than any other in the world—250 million with government permission, a fraction of that without. (Estimates range from 400,000 to a million.) Patches of the border, particularly urban ones, have been fenced and policed for decades. But this dotted line inconvenienced rather than stopped folks who neglected to secure a bureaucrat’s consent for their trip: Travelers trying to exercise their inalienable right to free movement simply went around the barriers. The feds never like being outfoxed, so they extended the fencing beyond populated areas. This drove migrants into increasingly remote and hostile terrain. There they not only had to survive encounters with America’s Border Patrol but also dehydration and other dangers in the desert. No More Deaths, a group that caches food and water along routes migrants are likely to take, estimates that at least 238 travelers perished in Arizona alone in 2006, with more than 4,000 “men, women, and children [losing] their lives in the deserts of the US-Mexico borderlands” from 1998 to the present.

Walling off Rights

You might think that would be tragedy enough for anyone. But as former President George W. Bush said when he signed the SFA, “We have a responsibility to enforce our laws. We have a responsibility to secure our borders. We take this responsibility seriously.” Apparently far more seriously than we do corpses or constitutional limits on government. And so the Act “authorize[d] the Department of Homeland Security to increase the use of advanced technology, like cameras and satellites and unmanned aerial vehicles to reinforce our infrastructure at the border.”

Authorizing DHS to grab more power is about as necessary as authorizing sparks to fly upward. Nevertheless, Congress exempted DHS from all federal laws as part of its 2005 REAL ID legislation. All it has to do is claim that a law impedes progress on the wall. Section 102 (c)1 of the REAL ID Act says, “Notwithstanding any other provision of law, the Secretary of Homeland Security shall have the authority to waive, and shall waive, all laws such Secretary, in such Secretary’s sole discretion, determines necessary to ensure expeditious construction of the barriers and roads under this section.”

This immunity extends all the way to judicial review: Judges can’t “order compensatory, declaratory, injunctive, equitable, or any other relief for damage alleged to arise from any such action or decision,” according to Section 102 (c) 2B. So far the unrelieved victims have been mostly Americans whose property the agency has seized or destroyed. Surely even those most opposed to immigration would agree that stopping it does not excuse such tyranny and injustice against citizens.

Environmental Destruction

Among the many regulations DHS is ignoring are environmental ones. But Mother Nature isn’t as easily overridden. There are consequences for flouting the laws of physics, for example. And DHS’s insouciance towards things like gravity and water has already hurt the government’s own property.

On July 12, 2008, a heavy rain near Ajo, Arizona, clogged drains in completed sections of the fence, damming the downpour and flooding Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, the only area in the United States where the plant grows wild. Park superintendent Lee Baiza told the Associated Press, “[We] had suggested that [DHS] take into consideration everything that can happen with a weather event. . . . We had a concern that this was going to happen.” And this storm wasn’t even a hurricane such as frequently roars through the Gulf and neighboring Texas.

The Rio Grande River separates Texas from Mexico for 1,254 miles before heading north. It waters a huge variety of wildlife, and that abundance draws conservancies to the area. Some are private, such as the Sabal Palm Audubon Center in Brownsville, Texas. Others are government-held lands that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife or National Parks Service manage. Over the decades, these organizations have cooperated with one another and the Mexican government to form a “wildlife corridor” so animals can range freely even if people can’t. The corridor also acts as a sanctuary for rare or endangered species. But DHS seems as hostile to animal life as it does to human life. It is hacking through this territory with a wide corridor of walls running parallel to one another, asphalt roads between, and hundreds of yards of cleared land to the north and south.

Barriers for stopping bipeds stop quadrupeds, too. This imperils animals that wander widely to feed or mate. Audubon Magazine points out that the inbreeding the wall compels will weaken if not exterminate America’s last colony of ocelots. This cat once roamed the Rio Grande and southern Arizona but now counts fewer than 100 members on the Texas side of the border.

A biologist at the University of New Mexico worries about other predators as well. Dr. Joe Cook told the Inter Press Service, “There is no quetion that jaguars . . . in the U.S. and northern Mexico would be significantly affected by the wall. . . . The only hope to preserve large carnivores in the wild is to have large areas of continuous, unfragmented habitat.”

The Mississippi and Central migratory flyways meet at the Rio Grande. Birds that once rested there during thousand-mile journeys will now contend with barren, paved land instead of trees, bushes, nuts, and seeds. Floodlights that turn desert night into day to discover migrants are already disorienting not only birds but bats and butterflies as well.

Financial Destruction

Matching the wall’s environmental disasters are its financial ones. In January 2007 the Congressional Research Service figured that 700 miles would cost about $49 billion, including maintenance. But as usual with the state’s estimates, this one probably isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on, especially if the rest of the barrier is anything like the 14 miles that wind inward from the California coast at San Diego. The first fence there—ten-foot-tall walls of welded steel—went up in 1993. Next came a “secondary” wall, this one 14 feet high, about 103 feet to the north. A chain-link fence runs parallel to that, with “stadium lighting” throwing every ugly detail into sharp relief. This monstrosity was supposed to cost $1 million per mile, but that skyrocketed to $3.8 million. And construction isn’t yet finished, in part because the California Coastal Commission frets about erosion. The bit that remains unfenced meanders through more challenging terrain, with construction estimated to reach $10 million per mile. If the price for the other 700 miles escalates proportionally, we are looking at an outlay of anywhere from $200 to $490 billion.

There are other, more hidden expenses. For example, the Fish & Wildlife Service has spent $100 million of our money over the last three decades to buy and replant land near the Rio Grande. The wall will ruin that investment. It will also end “eco-tourism” and the $125 million that 200,000 visitors annually spend in the hopes of glimpsing an ocelot or a Muscovy duck.

Naturally, while most Americans pay for the fence, a select few profit. DHS hired Boeing to implement its Secure Border Initiative (SBI) in September 2006. The company will install 1,800 towers as a “virtual fence” on our northern and southern borders within three years to “detect and track intruders through the use of cameras, sensors and motion detectors,” as Federal Computer Week puts it—all for only $2.5 billion. Needless to say, Boeing and DHS trumpeted their lucrative deal as a revolutionary, unprecedented, sure-fire solution for the “border problem” the feds have created. But the Washington Post took a more jaundiced view, citing the government’s “series of failures [in] control[ling] U.S. borders.” So did agents on the ground. Rich Pierce, executive vice president of the Border Patrol’s union, told Federal Computer News, “[SBI]—it’s been tried and it’s failed. . . . They’re not going to try anything new. . . . The people in the field know it’s not going to work.”

So did the legislators voting the funds. Rep. Harold Rogers was chairman of the Homeland Security Subcommittee from 2003 until January. According to the June 26, 2006 issue of Government Computer News, he “noted that spending on border security since 1995 has ‘quadrupled from $5.1 billion to over $17.9 billion,’ and the number of agents has jumped from 5,000 to 12,319. ‘However, during this same period, the number of illegal immigrants has jumped from 5 million to an estimated 12 million,’ Rogers said. ‘The policy of more money and no results is no longer in effect. We will not fund programs with false expectations.’” That would explain his subcommittee’s handing $39.9 billion to DHS in FY2009 with Rogers’s “support,” as he proclaimed on his website, despite the agency’s reputation even among the feds as one of their most wasteful and dysfunctional bureaucracies.

Sending Property Owners to Limbo . . .

Knowing that the fence won’t stop immigration, that it merely allows politicians to look as though they’re fixing an issue they’ve ginned up into a crisis, must particularly gall the property owners losing homes and businesses. Most of those victims live in Texas since the feds already own much of the land along the other states’ borders.

The barriers have always been more of a sieve than a fence since they proceed in fits and starts with long gaps between. The new miles of fence will not be much different, according to the Border Patrol: Tom Rudd, the Patrol’s chief in Brownsville, Texas, is “expecting a total of nine miles of fence segments,” according to PBS. “The segments, Rudd says, will act like funnels, pushing migrants into areas where his agents will be waiting to capture them.”

Those funnels bisect plenty of private property, including homes, farms, businesses, and nature preserves, as well as national parks and even towns. Stunningly, they don’t line the actual border. Some of the wall lies as much as two miles north of it. Landowners whose properties fall within that region face a bizarre limbo, severed from the rest of the country—and from the services their taxes supposedly buy them. Audubon Magazine quotes the Society’s executive director in Texas, Anne Brown, on the fate of its Sabal Palm Center: “From what we’ve heard, we’ll have to close. We can’t figure a way to keep it open, because we’ll be cut off from the rest of the United States. Will we be insured? Will we receive city services? We can’t let Ernie [the caretaker] live here anymore.” The magazine adds, “The sanctuary and its unique plants and wildlife will be taken from the American people, and what survives will be, for all intents and purposes, ceded to Mexico.”

Ordinary owners in Limbo Land also face extraordinary challenges. Pamela Taylor is an elderly émigré from England who married an American soldier 50 years ago, then moved to Brownsville with him. If anyone should welcome the protection the wall allegedly provides, it would be Mrs. Taylor. She once arrived home to find a migrant hiding from the Border Patrol in her living room. But she fears DHS and its fence far more than she does people looking for jobs and better lives. “They said the fence was gonna go right across the street,” she told PBS. “And . . . my son-in-law asked, ‘Well, do you mind, how are we going to get out?’ And the fellow from the Corps of Engineers said, ‘Well, you know, we hadn’t really thought about that. I guess you’re gonna have to follow the border patrol out.’” Obviously, that enormously complicates even the simple errand of buying groceries. And it could be fatal should Mrs. Taylor need a doctor.

PBS asked the Border Patrol’s Rudd about ingress and egress for the Americans caught in this quandary. Rudd said there will be “gates” and that “we’re still lookin’ right now—at different—locking mechanisms of what’s gonna work best in certain areas. . . . [O]ne approach that I’m lookin’ at . . . is—a push-key type, you know, the—the number system, a push pad . . . enforced with a camera—so we can make sure that that number or that combination—doesn’t get compromised . . . basically work with the owner to find out who’s gonna be in that area, what kinda vehicle they’d be driving.” The government hasn’t touched Mrs. Taylor’s property and so isn’t offering even eminent domain’s pittance, but it robs her nonetheless. Her land will be worthless. What buyer wants a hassle every time he needs a quart of milk?

DHS plans to swipe some properties lying directly in the fence’s path in their entirety, particularly when the parcel is small because the owner is poor. Other times, the fence threatens only a portion of the property—but it might as well take the whole piece because once again it’s destroying the land’s value. Leonard and Debbie Loop and their children own a 1,000-acre farm in Brownsville. But the wall will exile 800 acres to Limbo Land.

. . . Unless They’re Rich or Connected

Given that the wall doesn’t follow the border, as well as its frequent stops and starts, its placement is arbitrary at best. Many victims have noticed that while DHS expects them to sacrifice their interests, it is skirting property belonging to wealthy, politically connected neighbors. One victim, Eloisa Tamez, is a 72-year-old woman who still lives on some of the 12,000 acres her ancestors received in a Spanish land grant. She’s been down this road before. The feds stole more than half her holdings in the 1930s to build levees, and they didn’t pay a dime for any of it. The Texas Observer reports that now they want more. But the wall gobbling Ms. Tamez’s home stops short two miles down the road. That just happens to be the edge of Sharyland Plantation, 6,000 acres that billionaire Ray L. Hunt is developing into a luxurious, gated community of million-dollar homes. Hunt, of course, is not only George W. Bush’s buddy but his benefactor, too, since he’s kicking in $35 million toward the presidential library. The wall resumes on the other side of Sharyland.

Under former secretary Michael Chertoff, DHS refused to answer questions from folks like Ms. Tamez. But silence has long been one of the agency’s favorite tactics. It almost always withholds information on the grounds that telling the citizens who pay its bills what it’s doing with their money would jeopardize national security. It will neither confirm nor deny who’s on its notorious Terrorist Watch List, for instance, not even to the victims themselves. And so it goes with the wall. DHS refuses to verify its plans or discuss its rationale for the wall’s route. That leaves many owners grappling with rumors and stomach-churning uncertainty. Others are fairly sure DHS will steal their holdings because it has already ordered them to sign waivers allowing surveyors to measure their property. Those who refuse find themselves facing condemnation of their land.

Chertoff tried to cast cooperating with the agency’s theft as a patriotic duty. Despite abundant evidence to the contrary, he announced in February 2008, “I respect private property. But you cannot make border security and national security an individual choice for each individual landowner. . . . [W]hen people are smuggling drugs and human beings across the border, for an individual landowner to say, ‘I don’t care. I want to make sure that my view of the river is unobstructed,’ is not an acceptable answer.”

Dictatorical and Dishonest

That’s not only arrogant and dictatorial, it’s also profoundly dishonest. Protestors do not mourn vanishing vistas. They are instead defending their homes and businesses, some of which have been handed down through their families for generations. Meanwhile, the U.S. government’s unconstitutional jihads against those drugs and people it doesn’t like forces folks who want to transport either to smuggle them. Politicians have tried to control people’s movements and have failed at this immoral task; nevertheless, they expect the rest of us to cooperate with their new, desperate, criminal measures. Why?

Unfortunately, Leviathan has convinced most Americans that its campaign against “illegal” drugs justifies any and all abuses. So now it excuses its militarization of the Mexican border because of the marijuana crossing it. The feds take the same tack with “illegal” immigration. But they also spin things a bit differently to hide their heartlessness. They bewail the “smuggling of human beings,” conflating immigration with—incredibly enough—slavery.

In a speech on September 9, 2008, at the “Stop Human Trafficking Symposium,” conveniently sponsored by Customs and Border Patrol, Chertoff announced that “the line between so-called voluntary migration and human trafficking is not a very bold line. It is often the case that people who begin the movement across the border in a voluntary way . . . quickly turn into victims when they are held for ransom, or when they are required to work off the cost of the smuggling by paying off the vast majority of their wages to the smuggling organizations.” That may be exploitative, but it isn’t slavery since slaves seldom receive wages and so can’t “work off” any “cost.” And Chertoff ignores the fact that the government’s criminalization of migration gives those few entrepreneurs who do victimize their clients the chokehold they need: A “restaurant owner” who allegedly “trafficked hundreds of adults and children into the United States . . . threatened to turn them in to the authorities as illegal aliens if they tried to escape,” according to the Columbia (Missouri) Daily Tribune.

DHS portrays as vicious criminals guides who conduct people through hostile terrain and help them avoid the Border Patrol. The agency then presents its own ferocious attacks on immigrants, its armed patrols and cameras, its dogs, handcuffs, and holding pens, its hunts through the desert in air-conditioned ATVs for exhausted, fleeing families, as “rescuing” them from “human traffickers.” Odd, isn’t it, that migrants pay these “traffickers” to chaperone them across the border but try to fend off their “rescuers” by throwing rocks. They seldom succeed. Rather, they play right into the government’s hands: it charges them with the “crime” of self-defense, AKA, “assaulting a federal officer.” This inflates the number of “felons” crossing the border so that the feds “save” us from an even bigger menace.

An Unconstitutional Line in the Sand

Whether they’re between states or countries, borders soon cease to be noticed by most people living along them. They marry one another, establish businesses, visit, laugh, cry, agree, disagree, and dream together. So it is along the U.S.-Mexican boundary. The wall will sunder these families and friends as mercilessly as Berlin’s barricade did Germans.

The Founding Fathers understood government’s essence, its cruelty and callousness, far better than do modern Americans. That’s why their Constitution never empowers politicians to regulate anyone’s movement into or out of the country (except for slaves, fittingly enough: What else are we when we beg a bureaucrat, “Please, may I enter?”). Article 1, Section 9 bars Congress from “prohibit[ing]” the “Migration or Importation” of “such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit” until 1808. If we dismiss the doctrine of enumerated powers, this implies that Congress may prohibit all the migrating and importing it likes thereafter. And if we also dismiss the literary and historical context that limits Article 1, Section 9 to slaves, it appears the feds may indeed control anyone’s immigration after 1808—but only in those states existing at the Constitution’s adoption. None of those border Mexico, and mighty few do Canada. DHS needs to relocate its wall down the Atlantic coast.

Nor does the Constitution deputize the central government to “protect” the country’s borders, much less build walls “funneling” migrants through deadly desert where cops lurk to kidnap them. Immigration ought never to have been federalized in the first place; government had no business arrogating an “interest” in it during the 1870s, then tightening its vise each decade since. Immigration is an issue of property rights—not the DHS’s infernal abrogation of them, but a decision by the folks Michael Chertoff so despises, “each individual landowner,” as to whether migrants may cross his property.

Despite its utter lack of constitutional authority, DHS will probably continue militarizing our borders. Its current secretary, Janet Napolitano, opposed a physical wall when she was governor of Arizona. As she told AP, “You show me a 50-foot wall and I’ll show you a 51-foot ladder at the border.” Heavily implied is her support for more border agents as well as more high-tech surveillance. Napolitano is as implacable an enemy of freedom of movement as her predecessor Chertoff was, even if her methods differ.

Meanwhile, America has another border to the north, which Boeing’s contract covers as well. Landowners there should be very worried, given the abuses their southern brothers have suffered.

Indeed, all of us should worry, if not panic, when we remember that the walls keeping others out also keep us in.

Analogies are useful for analyses, debate, and persuasion. But just as they can enlighten, analogies can also mislead. They must be used, and heard, always with care.

The analogy of a home to a nation is more misleading than helpful. Unlike a home, a nation—at least each nation whose citizens are free—is not a private domain; it does not belong to anyone in the way that a house belongs to its owner. Also unlike in a home, living space within a free country is allocated by market transactions rather than by the conscious, nonmarket decisions of the residents of a house. A person who enters a country and purchases a place to live displaces no one in the way that an intruder into a home would displace a resident from his bed and favorite chair. In addition, of course, every intruder into a home likely intends to inflict some harm on the household’s residents. In contrast, the vast majority of persons who enter a country intend no harm to anyone.

Moreover, in a home each and every space is private; no place in a home is open to the public. A nonresident of a home can enter only if he first secures from a resident an invitation—an invitation that is nontransferable, of limited duration, and that specifies (if only implicitly) the time and conditions of the nonresident’s visit. Not so in a nation. Each nation is full of places that generally are open to the public. Roads, boulevards, sidewalks, parks, town squares, city centers, and airports are by their nature open to people without invitation.

And more: while in a home each resident personally knows (and frequently loves) each of the other residents, in a nation the citizens overwhelmingly remain strangers to one another. The percentage of America’s 300-plus million citizens whom I know is infinitesimal; I’ve not even laid eyes on the vast majority of them. The same is true for every other American, including the president of the United States.

Analogizing a nation to a home creates the myth that citizens of a nation can, and do, trust each other in ways that members of the same household typically trust each other. But, of course, when I lock my home at night I do so to guard against violence and theft that might otherwise be inflicted on my family by other Americans. If every foreigner were immediately and forever expelled from the United States today, I—like all Americans—would be not one whit less vigilant in locking my home.

The fact is that the relationships each of us has with our fellow citizens overwhelmingly are of the arm’s-length, impersonal variety. They are market relationships, governed chiefly by self-interest on both sides of each exchange. They are not the sorts of personal relationships that guide decisions made within households. They are, indeed, precisely the sorts of relationships that each of us has with strangers from foreign countries.

So what value is there in analogizing a nation to a home? Very little. No one would seriously insist that each city should shut down its streets at night (on the grounds that private homes at night become inactive). No one would seriously demand that each pedestrian on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue or on New Orleans’s Bourbon Street first secure a specific invitation to stroll those famous boulevards. And very few Americans would agree to give to the government the same sort of power to govern speech and personal behavior that members of each household routinely exercise over each other.

One final problem with this analogy deserves mention: if it is valid to analogize one sort of political jurisdiction (namely, the nation) to a house, it should be valid to analogize other political jurisdictions (such as states or counties or towns) to a house. Yet I’ve heard no one argue that Minnesota, or Orange County, California, or Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y., should “secure its borders” against nonresidents of these political jurisdictions. But why not? If a political jurisdiction really is like a house, then surely the failure of the state of to “lock its doors” is a foolhardy dereliction of responsibility.

Yes, it’s true that the U.S. Constitution prohibits such “door-locking” by states and locales. But it is also true that this document of delegated and enumerated powers never delegates the power to Uncle Sam to control immigration. The Constitution does give Congress the power to determine the conditions for attaining U.S. citizenship—but it says nothing about limiting immigration. A plausible interpretation of the Constitution’s silence on this matter is that America’s Founding Fathers

Ironically, those who speak of the nation as if it is “our” house seek to strip us Americans of some of our private property rights by deviously tapping into our justified sense of the importance of such rights. Because I secure and govern my real home—my house and my land located in the town of Burke, Virginia—I acknowledge the importance of my private rights to this property. And further, I strengthen this institution by acting in accordance with it. It is my and my family’s home; it belongs to no one else. Only my wife, my son, and I control access to our property. If my neighbor appears at my door one day with a gun, asserting some imagined prerogative to keep certain of my invited guests from entering my home, my neighbor clearly would be violating my rights. His actions would diminish my freedom and rob my family and me of rights that rightfully belong to us.

And so when some Americans use government to prevent peaceful non-Americans from entering the United States, my freedom is diminished and my rights are obstructed no less than when my neighbor takes it upon himself to interfere in my affairs. The sanctity of the private home that anti-immigrationists appeal to in their attempt to justify exclusionist policies is, in fact, weakened by those policies.

At the macro level we have political borders—unrelated to property rights, more permeable than personal-level borders, but just as important to ensuring liberty. When I drive from my home to my office, I cross the borders of multiple political subdivisions of the state of Ohio, moving from Columbia Township to Cleveland, from Lorain County to Cuyahoga County. Those borders are invisible but important. Cleveland confiscates 2 percent of my salary because my work lies within its borders (Ohio cities can levy local income taxes). Columbia Township taxes my home. Columbia does not tax my income, and so income I earn at home is worth 2 percent more to me than wages at work. Cleveland cannot tax my home, freeing me from the concern that people I cannot vote for could tax property as well as income. (Of course I also worry about people I can vote for taxing my income and assets, but at least there is a theoretical possibility of throwing the rascals out when I vote.)

These borders are all permeable: I do not need to show identification to pass across any of them and do not need to justify my purpose in moving among the various cities and towns along my drive to and from work.

Other macro-level borders are less permeable. When I walk across the U.S.-Mexican border near my parents’ home in Yuma, Arizona, in one direction I must satisfy Mexican authorities that my purpose is legitimate. In the other, I must satisfy U.S. authorities that my return is legitimate. In both directions, people with guns are standing by, ready to keep me out should I fail to satisfy them about the legitimacy of my purpose. Only the Americans with guns seem worried about who is entering the United States. They look at my identification, ask what I was doing in Mexico, and, sometimes, have dogs sniff my vehicle and belongings.

In many respects, these macro-level borders are wonderful things. Lorain and Cuyahoga counties in Ohio must compete for my family’s residence. Choosing to live where we do is related to the taxes charged by the communities where we might have lived. Investors make similar choices.

The choices by families about where to live and invest their money influence communities’ public policies. Choosing bad policies produces an exodus; choosing good policies leads to immigration of both capital and people. For example, Cleveland is trying to reverse its post-World War II decline in population by offering to exempt new construction from real-estate taxes for 15 years. Such competition isn’t perfect, of course, and only operates on the margin. Desirable locations such as New York City will be able to impose higher taxes than less-desirable locations such as Cleveland. Nonetheless, the competition offered on local taxation policy and other regulatory issues is important in restraining governments from infringing liberty.

Macro borders with competition enhance liberty. At the state and local level the only way politicians can prevent such competition is by eliminating borders. In Cleveland, “regional leaders” are pushing consolidation of local governments into one big entity as the solution to the exodus of population and investment to lower-tax jurisdictions. Fortunately, politicians’ self-interest also cuts against consolidation since it would mean fewer positions for them.

National Borders

National borders are also important sources of liberty. The Mexican border, for example, offers a choice between a drug-regulatory regime that requires a doctor’s prescription for most pharmaceuticals and one that does not. The streams of visitors to towns such as Algodones, Baja California, are not merely seeking lower prices. Some are seeking medicines unapproved in the United States; others are looking for medications for which they have no U.S. prescription, whether for recreational (such as Viagra) or medical (antibiotics) use. Mexico does not offer the pro-plaintiff tort doctrines of U.S. product-liability law, has lower barriers to entry for pharmacists, and a wide-open market for pharmaceuticals that includes openly advertised price competition. U.S. residents near the Mexican border thus have a choice of regulatory regimes for their medicine that those of us who live farther away do not. Border-region residents can buy medicines either with the U.S. bundle of qualities, restrictions, and rights, or the Mexican bundle. From the level of traffic of elderly visitors I’ve seen at the border crossing, it appears the Mexican bundle is more attractive for many.

Borders are thus friends of liberty in two important ways. First, without borders we would not have the competition among jurisdictions that restricts attempts to abridge liberty. The impact of borders goes beyond those who live near them. Pharmacists try to prevent the free sale of prescription drugs, but they would be much more successful if Mexico did not offer an alternative for at least some consumers. It is the margin that matters, and so free availability of pharmaceuticals in Mexico benefits even those of us who live in Ohio.

Jurisdictions thus compete to attract people and capital. This competition motivates governments to act to preserve liberty. Famously, for example, states compete for corporations, with Delaware the current market leader. Delaware corporate law offers companies the combination of a mostly voluntary set of default rules and an expert decision-making body (the Court of Chancery). As a result, many corporations, large and small, choose to incorporate in Delaware, making it their legal residence. (Their actual headquarters need not be physically located there.) Corporations get a body of liberty-enhancing rules; Delaware gets tax revenue and employment in the corporate services and legal fields.

That state’s position is no accident. At the beginning of the twentieth century, New Jersey was the market leader in corporate law. When New Jersey’s legislature made ill-advised changes to its corporations statute that reduced shareholder value, Delaware seized the opportunity and offered essentially the older version of New Jersey’s law. Within a few years, the vast majority of New Jersey corporations became Delaware corporations.

The second way that borders further liberty is that they allow diversity in law and other community norms, letting each individual find the setting that most resembles the type of society he or she desires. Everyone in Ohio need not agree on how to organize town activities: I can live in a township with few taxes and few services, and my more left-wing colleagues at the university who prefer a more interventionist society can live in Cleveland Heights, a suburb with an aggressive central-planning mentality and high taxes.

Borders prompt concerns among many people, however. Statists often worry about precisely the competition described above. In the European Union, for example, high-tax jurisdictions like France and Germany worry (correctly) that low-tax jurisdictions like Ireland will attract capital and jobs and thus create pressure to reduce taxes. In the United States, statists worry that cross-border competition will produce a “race to the bottom” in areas such as environmental protection.

Competition and Costs

Statists are correct that competition among jurisdictions will make clear the costs of the policies they promote. They are wrong when they suggest that cross-border competition is destructive of the quality of life, however. The former divide between East and West Berlin is a fine example of the impact of cross-border comparisons. East Germans could see the difference in outcomes between the two societies, and East Germany had to resort to increasingly costly and desperate measures to prevent its citizens from voting against communism with their feet. The example of West Germany did not erode the socialist regime by “unfairly” competing against it. West Germans had a higher standard of living and more freedom. Competition between the two Germanys exposed the cost of East German policies.

To prevent cross-border competition from exposing the costs of their favorite policies, unions, environmental pressure groups, and other special interests attempt to forestall it. International treaties requiring all nations to agree to particular interventionist measures are the latest means of forestalling competition. High-tax, heavy-regulatory jurisdictions in the European Union are waging just such a fight now, arguing, for example, that Ireland’s low taxes are “unfair” competition. Such agreements and treaties are merely the international equivalent of anticompetitive cartels among firms. But private firms cannot legally use coercion to enforce their cartels. Eliminating borders can thus reduce liberty by ending the competition that helps preserve it.

Of course, borders can also offer governments opportunities to threaten liberty. (But, then, what doesn’t offer governments a chance to restrict liberty?) In particular, the enforcement measures taken to secure borders are a major threat to liberty. Consider the U.S.-Mexican border. To prevent non-citizens from entering the United States across this 2,000-mile border, the United States has erected a steel wall in San Diego to divide the two countries and invested in a wide range of high-tech surveillance gear. Why? To prevent people who want to work in the United States, and who will make us better off by increasing economic activity, from doing so.

On the larger scale, we spend over $170 million a year on the immigration service, an agency whose behavior can too often be best described as “thug-like.” In its zeal to control our borders, the Border Patrol erects internal checkpoints to examine identity documents and question all motorists on highways leading from international borders. To take a minor example, I have been quizzed by gun-toting Border Patrol agents on where I was going and why I was going there—matters that are none of the federal government’s business under any circumstances—while driving on the interstate east of Yuma on the way to Phoenix, at a spot that provides a convenient chokepoint. For now, the federal agents only ask a few questions. But it is not too much of a stretch to imagine data-collection efforts that might be a real threat to privacy and freedom. Identifying those who regularly travel to border towns to take advantage of Mexico’s looser rules on medicine, for example, would be an easy next step.

As it does in other areas, the Leviathan can use crises to expand its power and reach by creating “border security” measures that also restrict liberty at home. Defending the borders of a free country from those who would reduce freedom is legitimate. But that defense must be conducted in a manner that does not destroy the liberty it is intended to protect.

In a post-9/11 world it is harder to see how to reconcile freedom and security. Markets, however, are already offering alternatives. A Cleveland startup company run by some friends, EagleCheck, is introducing a means of verifying identification without keeping records (www.eaglecheck.com). Several airlines are working on creating privately issued and verified identification documents that would speed moving through airports (and hence across borders). Credit-card companies and PayPal have greatly enhanced the ability to conduct financial transactions across borders. Given the demand for both security and liberty, it is not surprising to see markets responding in this fashion. None of these solutions is perfect, of course, but they illustrate how entrepreneurs can help provide security without reducing liberty.

Even though borders can be an excuse for reducing liberty, a world with lots of borders is nonetheless a far friendlier world for liberty than one with fewer borders. They promote competition for people and money, which tends to restrain the state from grabbing either. Borders offer chances to arbitrage regulatory restrictions, making them less effective. Without borders these constraints on the growth of the state would vanish.