THE RIGHT OF MIGRATION
In the winter of 1869-1870, Frederick Douglass delivered a speech on "Our Composite Nation" in various locations across the United States--including Burlington, Vermont, Boston, Peoria, Illinois, and Chicago. America's greatness, he argued, arose from its being a "composite nation" in that it was composed of different races of men with different creeds and religions, and this composite nationality showed America's devotion to "the equal rights of all men" as expressed in the Declaration of Independence.
We all know about Douglass as the slave who ran away from his master and then became famous as a black abolitionist writer and orator and a leader of the Republican Party during and after the Civil War. But what is less well known about Douglass is how he extended the principle of equality of rights to include all human beings--not just equality for both black and white people but equality for women as well as men, equal liberty for all religions, and equal rights for foreign people immigrating to the United States.
In his 1869 speech, Douglass criticized white Americans for their hostility to Chinese immigrants:
I submit that this question of Chinese immigration should be settled upon higher principles than those of a cold and selfish expediency. There are such things in the world as human rights. They rest upon no conventional foundation, but are eternal, universal and indestructible.
Among these is the right of locomotion; the right of migration; the right which belongs to no particular, but belongs alike to all and to all alike. It is the right you assert by staying here, and your fathers asserted by coming here. It is this great right that I assert for the Chinese and the Japanese, and for all other varieties of men equally with yourselves, now and forever. I know of no rights of race superior to the rights of humanity, and when there is a supposed conflict between human and national rights, it is safe to go the side of humanity. I have great respect for the blue-eyed and light-haired races of America. They are a mighty people. In any struggle for the good things of this world, they need have no fear, they have no need to doubt that they will get their full share.
But I reject the arrogant and scornful theory by which they would limit migratory rights, or any other essential human rights, to themselves, and which would make them the owners of this great continent to the exclusion of all other races of men (Douglass 1991, 252).
Earlier in this speech, Douglass had compared the "repugnance to the presence and influence of foreigners" to the "prejudice of race and color" that had supported chattel slavery: both express the natural human propensity to tribalism or xenophobia that favors us against them. Even if all other nations manifest this natural tribalism in limiting migratory rights and other human rights to themselves, America is unique in being the nation dedicated to human rights for all--"the faithful application of the principle of perfect civil equality to the people of all races and of all creeds." And therefore America must recognize the right of locomotion or migration as a right for all of humanity, so that America must have open borders.
Moreover, Douglass suggested that this human right to migration includes not only migration across national borders but also migration within a nation. Douglass's first writings and speeches told the story of how he emancipated himself from slavery by running away from his master, which he justified as a natural human right to flee from unjust oppression. This supported his argument that the fugitive slave laws that required capturing runaway slaves and returning them to their masters were unjust laws that violated natural law. Runaway slaves were exercising their human right to migrate from slavery to freedom.
Later in his life, Douglass justified another kind of internal migration. In 1886, in a speech on "Southern Barbarism," he lamented that with the end of Reconstruction, the old white master class of the South had restored their dominance over the Negro, and "he is worse off, in many respects, than when he was a slave . . . . he is actually a slave" (Douglass 1999, 715-16). Douglass had always hoped that the former slaves could work out their future as free men in the South. But once he saw the emergence of the Jim Crow South, he conceded that many blacks might want to emigrate to the North and thus "change their residence to parts of the country where their civil and political rights are better protected than at present they can be at the South" (1999, 702). He foresaw, however, that many blacks might be too poor to migrate, and that white landholders would obstruct their leaving because they needed their labor. He proposed, therefore, that the federal government should provide protection and financial support for those blacks who wanted to emigrate to the North.
A few blacks did begin moving North in the 1890s. And then after 1900, there were two or three great waves of black migration over the next 60 years. Before 1900, 90% of all black Americans lived in the South. But within a few decades, almost half lived in the North and the West. Eventually, as many as five million black people migrated out of the South.
Their ancestors had endured a forced international migration out of Africa into slavery in North America. Now they were moving by a free internal migration out of the Southern states into what they hoped would be a freer way of life in the Northern states.
Like those who have freely immigrated to America from all parts of the world, American blacks were voting with their feet for freedom.
THREE KINDS OF FOOT VOTING
When we speak of "voting with your feet," we distinguish this from ballot box voting. In his book Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom, Ilya Somin (a law professor at George Mason University) argues that in some ways foot voting is superior to ballot box voting. We often assume that ballot box voting is the main expression of political freedom because it allows citizens to choose what sort of government policies they want. But ballot box voting has at least two deficiencies. An individual voter has almost no chance of deciding the outcome of an election, which is why many people who are qualified to vote don't vote because they think it's a waste of their time. And for that reason, an individual voter has little incentive to become well-informed about the issues in any election.
Somin asserts that foot voting rectifies these two flaws in ballot box voting because foot voting provides "the opportunity to make a decisive choice and the associated stronger incentive to make well-informed decisions" (Somin 2020, 1). So, for example, those black individuals who chose to migrate from the American South to the North made a decisive choice for their lives that was informed by what they had heard about the greater freedom for black people in the North. Similarly, on September 3, 1838, when the twenty-year-old Frederick Douglass left Baltimore and travelled to a safe house in New York City, he had made a decisive and well-informed decision to move from slavery to freedom.
That's Somin's first great insight about foot voting as being better than ballot box voting. His second insight is that there are three types of foot voting in the modern world: "foot voting between jurisdictions in a federal system, foot voting through international migration, and foot voting in the private sector" (Somin 2020, 2). And if individual freedom is understood as the ability to choose for oneself how one wants to live, then each of these forms of foot voting expresses individual freedom.
I have written previously about international immigration as foot voting for freedom. As I have indicated, we see this foot voting for freedom even in the first states in Mesopotamia: the Mesopotamian states are full of evidence of people running away from their states--slaves running away from their enslavement, soldiers running away from their conscripted service in war, taxpayers running away from oppressive taxation, laborers running away from coerced labor, and people generally running away from cities racked with famine and contagious diseases.
So beginning with the first states, we see that people tend to move from poorer, violent, and exploitative societies into richer, peaceful, more just societies. And thus immigration tends to promote the spread of ideas and institutions that favor prosperity, peace, and justice--in other words, liberal capitalism. That explains why the United States and other liberal regimes have attracted some many immigrants over the past two centuries. But if Trump and the MAGA movement succeed in transforming America into an illiberal dictatorship, we can expect that immigrants will be voting with their feet for other countries that promise liberty.
Once people have migrated into a new country, they have to decide where to move within that country, which is a second form of foot voting--internal migration. In a federal system of government, they can choose between states (as in the United States) or provinces (as in Canada). They might also choose between smaller jurisdictions such as cities. As I indicated in my previous post, most of the immigrants to America in the decades before the Civil War chose to go to the states in the North and West because they thought the slave states in the South would offer them fewer opportunities. This became a crucial factor in favoring the Union over the Confederacy in the Civil War because the population of the North was greater.
Another example of internal migration is the life of J. D. Vance as he described it in his memoir Hillbilly Elegy. He describes the dysfunctional culture of his childhood community in a poor Appalachian-white region of Ohio. He then shows how his life was changed when he moved out of that community--joining the Marines, going to college at Ohio State University, going to law school at Yale. Then, with the help of Peter Thiel, he had a short career in venture capital before moving into politics. This all started, he explained, when he realized that he could "escape the worst of my culture's inheritance" by becoming a "cultural emigrant" who left home and never went back (Vance 2016, 252). He did return to Ohio so that he could run for the U. S. Senate with Trump's endorsement. But instead of returning to his Appalachian home region, he moved to the vibrant prosperous city of Columbus.
There is still a third form of foot-voting, when people exercise their freedom of choice in the private social and economic sector of a liberal regime. When people decide what goods and services they want to purchase in the market, or when they decide what social or religious organizations they want to join, they are voting with their feet.
A clear example of this is when people move into private planned communities. According to the Community Associations Institute, there are (as of 2023) 365,000 community associations in the United States with over 75 million residents. Perhaps the largest of these is Celebration, Florida, a private planned city originally designed by the Walt Disney Company that now has over 11,000 residents. These planned communities take over many of the functions traditionally belonging to local or regional governments, such as security, street maintenance, and waste-disposal. Notably, there are more private security guards than public police officers in the United States.
In previous posts, I have written about "private governance"--the various ways in which people in a free society can privatize their governance, which creates private communities and allows people to move to whatever community they find most desirable for them.
Actually, throughout most of their evolutionary history, human beings have lived in stateless societies--foraging bands--where all of the governance was private. Moreover, throughout the history of bureaucratic states, from Mesopotamia to the present, most of the local governance has been private. As I indicated in my post on Hammurabi's Code, that code of laws assumes that most of the enforcement of the laws will be by private individuals.
Another illustration of foot voting in the private sector is the religious liberty that allows individuals to freely join or leave religious organizations. In this way, a liberal regime provides the conditions for "The Benedict Option": people can withdraw from what they perceive to be a morally degrading secular society and form cohesive religious communities that enforce the norms of a religious life. The Amish communities are a particularly clear manifestation of this: they have chosen to move into tightly controlled religious communities where they can live their own distinctive way of life.
The general point here is that to understand foot voting for freedom, we need to see all of the three ways in which it is manifested--not just international migration but also internal migration and the freedom of movement in the private sector of economic and social liberty.
In my next post, I will show how the U.S. Constitution supports this.
REFERENCES
Douglass, Frederick. 1991. "Our Composite Nationality." In John Blassingame and John McKivigan, eds., The Frederick Douglass Papers: Series One: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, vol. 4, pages 240-59. New Haven, CN: Yale University Press.
Douglass, Frederick. 1999. Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings, ed. Philip S. Foner and Yuval Taylor. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books.
Somin, Ilya. 2020. Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom. Revised edition. New York: Oxford University Press.
Vance, J. D. 2016. Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. New York: Harper.
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