“Mexico’s GDP per capita is about what Poland’s was in 2004. That was the year Poland became a part of the E.U., and started sending a large flow of newly-legal migrant workers to a much wealthier Britain. This neither increased British unemployment, nor overtaxed social services. (EDITORIAL comment: These are both big fat lies, but whatever.)

“It’s been a boon to both the British and the Polish economies, and a higher percentage of Polish workers now circulate back home. Romania and Bulgaria are even poorer than Mexico, but they are now set to integrate their labor markets with the rest of the E.U. in seven years.”

The problem is, Mr. Wilkinson, which you so conveniently “forgot” to mention, is that indigenous Britons are leaving their homeland — where their ancestors have lived for thousands of years — at the rate of 500K a year, most of them because of the ill effects of massive, inappropriate, and deeply unsettling immigration from a vast plethora of competing non-indigenous, non-compatible cultures. And they are taking their skills and their wealth and their tax base with them. Ultimately this will cause the British economy to collapse, as those replacing the fleeing indigenous population are not as educated, wealthy or law-abiding as the natives. Their number one destination is Australia — the one Western nation left in the world that has strict immigration policies, and which also offers an approximation of the fleeing Britons’ native Anglo-Saxon culture and values.. Your libertarian fantasies are not going to work in a world where First Worlders will simply flee their native lands for ones that are not overwhelmed by immigration anarchy and cultural displacement. If your fantasy world is indeed so much “richer and freer” as you claim, why are all those Brits fleeing the homeland their ancestors have occupied for thousands of years? Closer to home, why are native-born Californians running away from the “richness” of massive immigration at the rate of 300K per year?

Massive immigration has also resulted, in both Britain and the US, in LESS freedom, not more, with the introduction of a huge police state to control ever-burgeoning crime rates (Britain has the largest per capita number of CCTV cameras in the world, California has draconian “three strikes and you’re out” laws), totalitarian “hate speech” and “anti-racism” laws that have virulently suppressed native culture and traditions, and Orwellian mandatory “diversity training” classes that resemble nothing so much as Maoist self-improvement sessions.

Also I find it rather amusing that a “libertarian” is using the European Union — a massive, socialistic, bureaucratic state controlled by unelected elites, which is becoming progressively more totalitarian as time goes by — as a model exemplar for “freedom.”

The “racism” charged isn’t disliked because it “stings”; it’s application is resented because, in modern-day America, it has the same relationship to reasoned debate as the atomic bomb has to conventional warfare. It is an ad hominem attack, which bypasses the merits of the interlocutor’s arguments and proclaims to an audience “I have looked into my opponent’s soul, perfectly understood his motivations, and have decided that he is beyond the pale of civilised discourse; under no circumstances should anything he says be considered”.

Because this slur tends to be unanswearble, has enormous deterrent effect (no one wants to be labelled a racist) and helps the user to convince himself that he is battling unadulterated evil rather than engaging in reasoned discourse, it takes some discipline and no small amount of good faith not to engage it at any and all opportunities. Both these qualities are in short supply.

That’s fine. Some libertarians speak as though the right to contract with whomever whenever were some sort of fundamental, inalienable right which ought to trump all other interests.

The fact is, economic concerns are but one-tenth of the argument against immigration. The failure to grapple with externalities (in terms of crime, population density, social cohesion, cultural continuity, etc.) ensures that libertarians absent themselves from 90% of the debate.

To the extent that these concerns are addressed by libertarians, they usually adopt Alphie’s technique: the mindless and facile slur of “racism”.

The American people are not going to support porous borders, cosmopolitan liberalism or not, so long as the social sciences are not an integral part of the solution, as well as free economics.

We’d rather be racist than rich, I ’spose.

Mises appears to have thought getting rid of the interventionist state, along with the creation of a right of secession (see sec.2) were necessary conditions in order to have “universal movement”. Libtertarians today assure us they will do those things after the borders are thrown open.