No to Borders, Yes to Allowing Whites-Only Enclaves

Common intuitions are backwards

The media has started to pay a great deal of attention to the remote whites-only enclave in Arkansas. So far, it reportedly has 40 people living on 160 acres of land. This movement has been denounced by the attorney general of the state and the idea that it might expand into Missouri has there too been greeted with bipartisan outrage.

This is kind of funny in a world where it is increasingly common in Republican circles to advocate immigration restriction on “cultural” grounds, on a planet full of people who are assimilating to American norms, especially when they live here for any significant length of time. One will often hear defenses of closing the border that make analogies to private property. “Shouldn’t we get to decide who lives here?” “How dare people in gated communities oppose the nation putting up a wall?” There’s a commentator on this Substack who tries to argue for immigration restrictionism on libertarian grounds, saying that because we have public roads, a majority vote can decide who gets to be excluded from them.

These analogies have all kinds of problems. A nation is obviously not private property. If it were, then American citizens themselves would have no rights whenever they found themselves outvoted. The majority could decide that since you are in “their” house, they can put any conditions they want on you living there. Anyone who does anything the government doesn’t approve of could be banned from public roads.

Not bothering anyone.

At the same time, the whites-only enclave has no such problems. It is as pure an instance of the innocent exercise of private property rights as one can imagine. People here are setting out on their own far from civilization. They build their own community only with others who have opted into it. “Your right to swing your arms ends just where the other man’s nose begins.” Here’s an instance of people going so far away there’s no danger of anyone else even having to look at their arms, much less being hit by them. If liberalism means anything, it means leaving these people alone.

The conservative movement, then, while justifying immigration restrictionism by an appeal to a metaphorical version of private property rights, is somewhere between ambivalent and hostile when it comes to protecting the real thing. The fact that it is “racism” that so horrifies them only adds to the irony. What exactly is their basis for opposing immigration? Did Republican voters all study economics and decide that the profession is wrong based on their deep understanding of the issues involved? Why do they suddenly develop an interest in income inequality when talking about this issue but no other? It’s beyond obvious that racism – or perhaps some adjacent concept like nativism that similarly values people based on characteristics unrelated to character or any other form of merit – is the motivating force behind immigration restrictionism.

To be fair, this isn’t simply about Republicans, but really a story of the views of most human beings. Republicans are just more hypocritical, because they pretend to believe in property rights and oppose racism, though I’m under no illusions that Democratic run states wouldn’t be more likely to shut down a whites-only community.

The median position among all voters is surely that borders should be about as strict as they are now or stricter, and that private communities should not be allowed to discriminate based on race. This is because most people are moral imbeciles. They are not reflective enough to understand what motivates them, and will sometimes even get angry at those who, like our friends in the Ozarks, make their own hypocrisy too obvious. So Americans oppose immigration due to bigotry, and then want to burn at the stake anyone who practices honest racism.

The problem with the immigration restrictionist isn’t necessarily that he wants to build community. The issue is one of scale. Voters in Missouri and West Virginia try to tell New York City and San Francisco, who are welcoming towards new arrivals, that their preferences must be overruled in the name of national unity. Trump sends the National Guard to Los Angeles to fight against a community that rebels against his administration with every tool it has, supposedly because this shows that we are a nation, not an economy.

The whole thing is grotesque. Meanwhile, groups like Orthodox Jews, the Amish, and Mormons live according to their principles, and there is nothing objectionable about that. People should similarly be able to organize around the concept of whiteness, however they define it, without any legal interference. The beauty of freedom is that you do not have to like, or even ever think about, what people with different values do. The search for community is not something that should be undertaken through national policy, except when necessary to defend freedom of association. The larger the polity, the more abstract the principles to hold it all together need to be, and at that level liberty must be the cornerstone of any vision that is morally acceptable and consistent with human flourishing.