Dave Smith and Alex Nowrasteh Debated Immigration

I lost because democracy is flawed

Dave Smith and I debated the resolution “Government restrictions on the immigration of peaceful and healthy people make sense from a libertarian standpoint, especially in present-day America,” at the Soho Forum in New York. Dave was for the affirmative, and I was for the negative. The legendary Gene Epstein moderated.

I lost the debate according to Oxford-style rules where the audience votes on the resolution before and after. The side that gains the most (or loses the least) wins. Dave gained 21 percent, and I gained 15. According to the percentages, Dave’s vote share went from 41 percent to 63, and mine rose from 18 to 34. In other words, my share of votes increased by 87.5 percent and Dave's by only 52 percent, but I still lost because more people ultimately shifted to agreeing with him. I asked ChatGPT to list debate outcome determination methods by their manipulability and Oxford-style earned the second spot, following online audience polls. Judges, panels, Lincoln-Douglas, and anonymous ballots were less manipulable, according to the AI. If I had won, I wouldn't have even considered asking AI that question. Dave won fair and square according to audience votes.

Dave’s main argument is that free immigration is unpopular, so immigration restrictions are libertarian. I know what you're thinking, and I don't understand how his argument is related to libertarianism either, and he said so several times during the debate. Appeals to majority opinion are neither here nor there in a debate over libertarian policy positions. Dave had an oddly swampy Beltway-centric read of what policies libertarians should support, while I, the Cato DC libertarian, was the one concerned with principles. Dave has an inclination similar to Murray Rothbard's, where they both alter their ideology to build coalitions toward political power. More charitably, they change what they emphasize in political appeals. And that's fair enough. Politics is messy and requires compromise, and people like Dave could have a good sense of that, but it's orthogonal in a debate about libertarian principles.

Dave also argued that the government should be able to exclude immigrants from public property by channeling the median voter’s property management guidelines, which is a Hoppean claim that would result in very un-libertarian outcomes. If one were to accept that Hoppean argument, then the government could exclude people from driving on public roads for worshipping the wrong religion, uttering the wrong speech, or engaging in any other action that free people ought to be able to engage in. Furthermore, no government has ever behaved the way that Hoppeans think, and it's quite odd to expect it to, considering the systemic incentive, calculation, and knowledge problems that bedevil state economic management. What's sillier is that Dave and the audience branded the Hoppean approach as realistic, while mine was fantastical. How somebody can consider an abstract Hoppean theoretical proposition as the "realist" approach to immigration policy while judging my proposed adoption of America's 1875 policy as utopian and “unrealistic" is baffling. It must be my fault.

The government supposedly acting as a private property owner, which is silly because libertarianism’s strongest points is that the government cannot act like a private property owner, is the justification for immigration restrictions because Americans want that. It’s true that Americans want restricted immigration in the voting booth, but they sure don’t believe it when they vote with their dollars and their feet. Americans move to areas with more immigrants and they buy from and sell to them with alacrity. If nobody here wanted to hire immigrants, sell them stuff, or buy from them, then they wouldn't come. That revealed preference is confirmed millions of times a day by Americans and should matter more to a libertarian than ballots cast every four years.

I’m convinced that my points were superior, but I lost according to the rules of majoritarian democracy that are incapable of deciding the truth of any factual or philosophical claim. It was fun debating Dave and I hope we can do so again.