How Libertarians Fall for Big Government on Immigration
When self-described libertarians defend extensive government powers to restrict immigration, something has gone seriously wrong.
That’s exactly what happened in a recent Soho Forum debate. Dave Smith, later backed by Robert Murphy, argued against free movement. In doing so, they fell into a familiar trap—one reminiscent of Milton Friedman’s flawed account of the Great Depression, which led him to justify central bank interventions. Just as Friedman focused narrowly on the consequences of the 1929 crash while ignoring the inflationary boom that came before, Smith and Murphy fail to see how government interventions created today’s immigration tensions.
Wall at the U.S.-Mexico Border in San Diego, 26 November 2021.
This isn’t a fringe issue. When libertarians ignore the root causes of public hostility to immigration, they end up abandoning their principles—and worse, supporting new state powers. In trying to “live in reality,” they accept government interventions—welfare transfers, public school monopolies, and labor market regulations—not as distortions to remove, but as unchangeable facts.
The result is a fundamentally statist worldview disguised in the language of liberty.
Public backlash to immigration doesn’t arise in a vacuum. Like Friedman, who ignored the deeper inflationary distortions that led to the Great Depression, Smith and Murphy overlook the government’s role in shaping today’s frustrations.
Start with the minimum wage—conspicuously absent from the Soho debate. Minimum wage laws shut low-skilled workers, especially new immigrants, out of legal employment. Many are then pushed into informal or criminal work, only to be blamed for the very marginalization caused by exclusionary labor markets.
Or take welfare transfers. When immigrants receive public benefits without prior contribution, it generates public resentment and, over time, encourages attitudes of entitlement that are counterproductive to a thriving society. These problems stem not from immigration itself, but from the state’s forced pooling of resources.
Public schooling is another example. The state compels taxpayers to fund schools and limits parental choice, all while assigning students—including newcomers—without regard for local preferences. The resulting friction, once again, is the product of state coercion.
To his credit, Alex Nowrasteh—the debater in favor of free movement—pointed at some of these government distortions. But he weakened his case by refusing to admit there’s a problem at all. By focusing on data claiming immigrants commit fewer crimes or contribute more than natives, he missed the point. The central issue is the government restricting people’s movement based on problems it created.
Because he didn’t fully confront the real sources of social tension, Nowrasteh left his argument vulnerable—and lost the debate.
Smith and Murphy’s confusion goes further. They equate free movement with chaos—climate protesters blocking roads or drunks stumbling into schools. But that’s a category mistake.
Free movement, in immigration terms, simply means removing state-imposed restrictions like visas, work permits, and residence approvals. It doesn’t violate private property. It doesn’t mean anyone can enter your house or your school. It also doesn’t eliminate border checks for public health or public order concerns.
It means individuals can live and work wherever someone is willing to host or hire them—without needing government permission.
Yet Smith oddly claims free movement is itself a government program. That’s backwards. A system of voluntary exchange—people moving where there’s mutual agreement—is not state imposition.
Murphy, meanwhile, appeals to the idea of government property. But immigration restrictions aren’t based on ownership claims. Even if an immigrant lands at a privately owned airport, the state’s rules still apply. These restrictions have nothing to do with property rights.
In truth, the frustrations people feel about immigration are symptoms of distorted markets. But instead of identifying those distortions and arguing for their removal, Smith and Murphy take them as givens.
They claim they’re just acknowledging reality. Then, based on those government-created realities, they build a case for even more government control. By failing to trace today’s immigration tensions back to state intervention, they wind up defending those very interventions.
Smith’s analogy between immigration and entry into a private home is revealing. He argues that, since Americans are taxed to fund public services, they should decide who gets access. But this logic takes the coercion—the taxation and monopolized services—for granted. It treats state power as the starting point, and then builds policy on top of it.
Murphy takes this one step further. While admitting the market solution is ideal, he says straightaway we just can’t get there now. That’s a strange kind of fatalism from someone who claims to represent libertarian economics.
Instead of advocating to dismantle coercive systems, Smith and Murphy assume those systems are here to stay. From there, it’s a short leap to more control, more management, and more restrictions.
Smith even argues that immigration should be planned according to society’s collective preference. But that is central planning. It’s not the market that decides. It’s the state.
Smith uses democracy and sovereignty to defend this approach. But in practice, “the will of the people” becomes the will of state officials enforcing it. That’s not local control—it’s centralization in disguise.
What starts as a call for realism ends as a case for state planning: who comes in, where they go, and how they integrate. These aren’t libertarian positions. They’re technocratic ones.
A genuinely libertarian position doesn’t meet state-caused problems with more state power. It dismantles the coercive systems that caused the problems. That means ending minimum wage laws, which exclude immigrants and young people from formal work. It means ending forced wealth redistribution, which generates resentment and entitlement. And it means replacing monopolized schooling with voluntary alternatives.
Free movement is not a utopian ideal. It belongs to the same reform agenda as deregulation and the rollback of state power. There’s no principled case for restricting liberty now in the hope of someday expanding it.
By treating the consequences of state coercion as permanent facts, Smith and Murphy end up calling for more coercion. Like Friedman misdiagnosing the Great Depression, they prescribe more of the very intervention that caused the problem.