Locke's Open Borders Immigration Policy as Cultural Group Selection

The Human Freedom Index explains the global patterns of migration:  people in countries with a low freedom ranking want to leave and migrate to countries with a high freedom ranking.  Syria is at the absolute bottom of the Human Freedom Index for 2018--the least free of the 162 countries ranked--and much of the migration out of the Middle East in recent years has been from Syria, as these migrants have tried to reach the countries in Europe and North America that rank high for freedom.  People in the countries in Central America ranking low in freedom--Honduras (92th), Guatemala (66th), and Mexico (75th)--want to enter the United States (17th) or Canada (5th).  As far as I know, there aren't a lot of Honduran migrants trying to cross the border into Venezuela, which ranks at 161 of the HFI, just above Syria.

As a consequence of this migration towards freedom, there is a stunning correlation between a country ranking high on the HFI and the country having a high proportion of its population being either immigrants or native-born offspring of immigrants.  For New Zealand--the number one country on the HFI--the proportion is almost half!  For Switzerland--the number two country--the proportion is 45%.  For Canada, it's 38%.  For the U.S., it's 25%.

While travelling around New Zealand last summer, I was amazed by how many of the New Zealanders I met were immigrants or children of immigrants.  Some of them told me that they had wanted to immigrate to the United States, but when they found the barriers to immigration too high, they chose New Zealand instead.  They were puzzled as to why America was closing its borders to immigration.  But many of them had decided that New Zealand was a better choice for them after all, because it offered more freedom to live their lives as they wished.

What we see here is what evolutionary scientists call cultural group selection through migration and assimilation, in which countries with cultural traditions of freedom have higher fitness than countries that are less free.  John Locke understood this, which is why he argued that free societies benefited from having open borders, so that they could attract migrants from less free societies.  The freer societies with a growing population of productive and inventive people become the more prosperous societies.  While countries like New Zealand have adopted the Lockean liberal immigration policy, the United States under the rule of Trump the Nationalist is raising barriers to immigration, which means that if the United States continues to move away from Lockean liberalism, it will become a loser in this evolutionary process of cultural group selection, in which people vote with their feet in favor of freedom.


IMMIGRATION IN LOCKE'S "GREAT ART OF GOVERNMENT"

In his chapter on property in the Second Treatise, Locke claims that the great source of useful commodities for human life is human labor and industry.  "Unassisted nature" gives us acorns, water, and leaves, while human labor gives us bread, wine, and cloth for our food, drink, and clothing.  Land left wholly to nature has little value for us until it has been improved by the human labor of pasturage, tilling, or planting.  Locke then writes:

"This shews, how much numbers of men are to be preferred to largenesse of dominions, and that the increase of lands [hands?] and the right imploying of them is the great art of government.  And that Prince who shall be so wise and godlike as by established laws of liberty to secure protection and incouragement to the honest industry of Mankind against the oppression of power and narrownesse of Party will quickly be too hard for his neighbours" (sec. 42).

Christ's College Cambridge has a copy of the 1698 edition of Locke's Two Treatises with Locke's handwritten annotations, although some scholars doubt that this is Locke's own handwriting.  This book is now available online.  If you look at sec. 42, page 197, you will see that the passage quoted above was written into the margin.  So it's likely that Locke made this addition to his text sometime after 1698, while Locke was working at the Board of Trade.  At this time King William III's government was in conflict with France, and Locke was recommending (in his economic writings of the time) that increased population was a better source of power than expanded territory.

The reference to a "godlike" Prince seems oddly contrary to Locke's rejection of divine right of kings, but his meaning is clarified by passages in the First Treatise (secs. 33, 41), where God's command to Noah and his sons in Genesis 9:1 to "be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the Earth" is identified by Locke as "the great design of God."  This supports Locke's policy for increasing population and his argument that one of the bad effects of absolute monarchy, as in France, is declining population.

As Brian Smith (2018) has indicated in an insightful article, the reference in this passage to "increase of lands" seems to be better understood as "increase of hands."  He shows that this is supported by what Locke says about the benefits of increasing population in some of his other essays.   In his "Essay on Toleration" (1667), Locke argued that toleration increased immigration, which increased population and commerce.  "As to promoting the welfare of the kingdom which consists in riches and power, to this most immediately conduces the number and industry of your subjects" (Locke 2010, 122).  This became evident in 1685, when King Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, which had granted some toleration of Calvinist Protestants in Catholic France in 1598.  This created an exodus of French Protestants, also called Huguenots, who were forced to migrate to England and elsewhere.

In his essay on "Trade" (1674), Locke asserted: "Power consists in numbers of men, and the ability to maintain them.  Trade conduces to both of these by increasing your stock and your people, and they each other" (Locke 1997, 222).

Locke's most important writing on his liberal policy for what he called the "easy naturalization" of immigrants is his essay "For a General Naturalization," which is dated around 1693, although it was not published until about 30 years ago, in an article by David Resnick (1987).  In response to the large influx of immigrants to England at the end of the 17th century, including the French Huguenots, there were several "general naturalization" bills introduced into Parliament.  The bill introduced in 1693 was most famous because of the speech by Sir John Knight attacking it.  Knight's published speech was so vehement that it was condemned by Parliament as libelous, and Parliament ordered that it be burned in public by the common hangman.

Knight complained that immigrants would compete with native English laborers for jobs, which would lower their wages and drive them into starvation, and this would provoke outrage from the English people.  He also warned that foreigners could not be loyal English citizens.  Other critics argued that any general naturalization law would be a threat to the ethnic identity of the English race, because they would intermarry with native English people, which would lead to the extinction of the English race.

"For a General Naturalization" was probably written in support of the general naturalization bill of 1693.  "Naturalization is the shortest and easiest way of increasing your people," Locke declared at the beginning of the essay. Increasing population is important, he explained, because "people are the strength of any country or government," and it's "the number of people that make the riches of any country" (Locke 1997, 322).

He thought that this was illustrated by the difference between Holland and Spain:

"The latter having all the advantages of situation and the yearly afflux of wealth out of its own dominions [the silver imports from Spanish America], yet is for want of hands the poorest country in Europe.  The other [is] ill situate[d] but being crammed with people [is] abounding in riches . . . And I ask whether England if half its people should be taken away would not portionably decay in its strength and riches notwithstanding the advantages it has in its situation, ports, and the temper of its people" (Locke 1997, 322-23).

So, despite Spain's extensive colonial land holdings in the New World, Spanish tyranny creates a "want of hands" that make Spain poor.  Holland is "crammed with people," because it is a free and tolerant country that attracts immigrants from Spain and other countries that are less free and tolerant.  Even Locke had to escape to Holland to avoid arrest for treason in England. And Holland's vigorous trade and commerce make it prosperous.  In "For a General Naturalization," Locke writes: "The riches of the world do not lie in formerly having large tracts of land, which supplied abundantly the native convenience of eating and drinking [such] as plenty of corn and large flocks and herds.  But in trade, which brings money and with that all things" (Locke 1997, 323).

In this short essay of no more than four pages, the word "hands" appears 8 times, which sustains Brian Smith's claim that in the "art of government" passage of the Second Treatise, the "increase of lands" phrase must really mean "increase of hands."  Moreover, in this essay, Locke indicated that "hands" are needed not just for agricultural work but even more for the manufacture of commodities and for the carriage and navigation necessary for trade.

In this essay, Locke answers four objections to his recommended policy for general naturalization and open borders.  The first objection is that "we shall not have artisans come over to be naturalized but idle people" (1997, 324).  Locke answers by pointing out that no one can migrate to another country with the expectation that they will live upon other people's labor.  If there are laws for maintaining the poor, they do not have to be open to foreigners.  And if these laws for maintaining the poor do encourage immigrants to be idle, that is a mistake in the laws: "If by poor are meant such as want relief and being idle themselves live upon the labour of others; if there be any such poor amongst us already who are able to work and do not, 'tis a shame to the government and a fault in our constitution and ought to be remedied" (1997, 326).

A second objection is that we have too many people already.  But no one can say that who sees that Holland has twice the population of England, and Holland is rich.  Moreover, if a country is already so full of people that artisans and laborers cannot live better there than in their home countries, one need not fear their migration, because people will not move to another country to be worse off.  Immigration, therefore, is self-regulating, because people have no personal incentive to migrate to countries that already have too many people.

A third objection is "that they eat the bread out of our own people's mouths."  But this is "no further true than it is a confession that they work cheaper or better, for nobody will leave his neighbor to use a foreigner but for one of those reasons, and can that be counted an inconvenience which will bring down the unreasonable rates of your own people or force them to work better?  Want of people raises their price and makes them both dear and careless." (1997, 325).  So, again, immigration is self-regulating in that immigrants will be attracted to countries with a high demand for labor manifest in high wages, and if immigration drives wages down, then immigration will stop.  Even Donald Trump employs illegal immigrants at his golf court resorts because he cannot find native Americans to fill the jobs.

A fourth objection implicitly acknowledged in Locke's essay is that immigrants will not be assimilated into English society.  Once immigrants are naturalized, Locke answers,

"they are then in interest as much our own people as any.  The only odds is their language, which will be cured too in their children, and they be as perfect Englishmen as those that have been here ever since William the Conqueror's days and came over with him.  For 'tis hardly to be doubted but that most of even our ancestors were foreigners" (1997, 325).

If immigrants do not speak English, that will impede their assimilation into English culture, but their children will speak English, and thus become "perfect Englishmen."  After all, most Englishmen are descended from foreign ancestors.

Notice also that contrary to the claims of the illiberal nationalists, Lockean liberalism can recognize the importance of the national identities that distinguish one people from another, because here Locke recognizes the cultural identity of the English people as a distinct nation rooted in the English language and other cultural traditions that have emerged from the cultural history of England.


IMMIGRATION AS CULTURAL GROUP SELECTION FOR LOCKEAN LIBERALISM

Within the past 25 years, evolutionary theorists--such as Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson--have seen that Locke was right about immigration, and that cultural group selection (CGS) working through selective migration and assimilation has favored the spread of Lockean liberal culture around the world (Boyd & Richerson 2009; Richerson & Boyd 2008).  This confirms what I have argued in various posts about the evolutionary history of Lockean liberalism as symbolic niche construction (here, here, and here).

This is the evolutionary explanation for what Francis Fukuyama famously called "the end of history."  Lockean liberalism so fully satisfies the natural desires of evolved human nature that all illiberal social orders must fail in the long run to attract adherents.  One good indication of this is that even those recent critics of liberalism like Patrick Deneen and Rod Dreher actually turn out to implicitly endorse the liberalism of open societies.  I have written about this here, here, and here.

Boyd and Richerson conclude: "Human migration is nonrandom.  In small-scale societies of the past, and in the modern world, people tend to move to wealthier, safer, and more just societies from poorer, more violent, less just societies.  If immigrants are assimilated, such nonrandom migration can increase the occurrence of culturally transmitted beliefs, values, and institutions that cause societies to be attractive to immigrants" (2009, 331).  Contrary to what Friedrich Hayek said about modern open societies having to repress the tribal instincts shaped in our prehistoric past, Richerson and Boyd see that "the free enterprise societies' combination of individual autonomy, wealth, and welfare bear a strong resemblance to the preferences that are rooted in our ancient and tribal social instincts" (2008, 134).

If so, then Spinoza was right about a liberal capitalist democracy being the best form of social order, because it best approximates the freedom that human beings enjoyed in the evolutionary state of nature of our hunter-gatherer ancestors.  (I have written about this here and here.)

As suggested by both Locke and Boyd and Richerson, the success of cultural group selection through immigration depends on immigrants becoming assimilated into their new national cultures.  Recently, some commentators have worried that immigrants today no longer assimilate as well as earlier generations of immigrants.  But a lot of research has shown that while assimilation is never perfect, it does happen over time.  Through ethnic attrition, immigrants intermarry, and the children of these intermarriages become ever more assimilated into the new culture.  Moreover, as Locke indicated, even if the first immigrants speak a foreign language, the children of immigrants easily learn the language of their new country.  Much of this research on the assimilation of immigrants has been surveyed by Alex Nowrasteh (2016).

In a liberal open society, the assimilation of immigrants does not require the obliteration of the communal identity of immigrants.  After all, one of the primary reasons why people immigrate to free and tolerant societies is so that they can live in their distinctive moral and religious communities without persecution.  The immigration of groups like the Anabaptists and the Chaldeans to the United States illustrate this.  I have written about the Chaldeans here.


REFERENCES

Boyd, Robert, and Peter J. Richerson. 2009. "Voting With Your Feet: Payoff Biased Migration and the Evolution of Group Beneficial Behavior." Journal of Theoretical Biology 257: 331-39.

Locke, John. 1997. Political Essays. Ed. Mark Goldie. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Locke, John. 2010. A Letter Concerning Toleration and Other Writings. Ed. Mark Goldie. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.

Nowrasteh, Alex.  2016.  "The Great Assimilation Scare."  Cato Institute Blog, January 19.

Resnick, David. 1987. "John Locke and the Problem of Naturalization." Review of Politics 49: 368-88.

Richerson, Peter J., and Robert Boyd. 2008. "The Evolution of Free Enterprise Values." In Paul J. Zak, ed., Moral Markets: The Critical Role of Values in the Economy, 107-41.  Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Smith, Brian. 2018. "Hands, Not Lands: John Locke, Immigration, and the 'Great Art of Government,'"  History of Political Thought 39: 465-90.

Passive Obedience or Active Resistance to the Red Caesar? Hume's Critique of Lockean Consent and Resistance

Proponents of the Red Caesar Plan (such as Curtis Yarvin and Michael Anton) has said that their ultimate goal is to move America away from John Locke's classical liberalism and towards Robert Filmer's reactionary authoritarianism.  They will achieve that goal when Trump rules America as the Red Caesar with the arbitrary power of an absolute monarch like that defended by Filmer: this Caesaristic Trump cannot be limited by the rule of law because he is the absolute sovereign, and whatever the sovereign wills is the law, and only what the sovereign wills is law.  Trump will rule as a tyrant, and, as Filmer argued, the people will be obligated not to resist his rule but to show passive obedience to him.

Locke challenged Filmer's teaching by arguing in his Two Treatises of Government for what today we would call classical liberalism.  In seventeenth-century England, Filmer was on the side of the Tories, while Locke was on the side of the Whigs.  

Locke's position can be summarized in five principles.  First, every person possesses the natural rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness--rights that first arose in the state of nature where human nature was formed.  Second, these natural rights are rooted in each person's self-ownership--his right over himself and his labor.  Third, the only just function of government is to protect those natural rights.  Fourth, government derives its limited authority from the consent of the governed.  Fifth, political rulers who become tyrants who infringe upon or fail to protect those natural rights may rightly be resisted and replaced.

If we agree with Filmer, then our proper response to Trump as the Red Caesar will be passive obedience.  If we agree with Locke, then our proper response will be active resistance.  Or is there perhaps some moderate middle ground between these two extremes?  

One way of thinking through this debate is to consider one of the best critiques of Locke's teaching--by David Hume in his Essays (Liberty Fund, 1985).

Hume saw the conflict between the Tories as the party of authority and obedience to rulers and the 
Whigs as the party of liberty and resistance to tyranny as a political battle in which the partisans of each faction refused to see the partial truth in each side: good government requires a tense balance between authority and liberty, so that each side moderates the other.  Extreme authoritarianism creates tyranny.  Extreme libertarianism creates anarchy.  The task of a philosopher is not to become a partisan but to mediate between the two extremes and promote compromise and accommodation.  Hume saw himself as a true philosopher, while identifying Locke as a partisan rather than a true philosopher (27-31, 40-41, 69-72, 465-66, 469-70, 486-87).

But if one reads Locke carefully in the light of Hume's critique, one can see that Locke is indeed a philosopher rather than a narrow partisan, and he agrees with Hume that good government requires a balance between authority and liberty.  And while Hume attacks Locke's doctrine of consent, Hume ends up closer to Locke's position that he realizes.

Remarkably, Hume accepts Locke's claim that in the original state of nature among hunter-gatherers, every adult was equally free from being ruled by anyone else; and therefore, nothing but their own consent could bring them together into a society and subject them to any authority.  "If this, then, be meant by the original contract, it cannot be denied," Hume observed, "that all government is, at first, founded on a contract, and that the most ancient rude combinations of mankind were formed chiefly by that principle" (468).

But even if government in its earliest and most primitive forms arose from "consent or rather the voluntary acquiescence of the people," it is not true, as Locke claims, that later fully developed governments as we see them today rest on no other foundation than the consent of the people.

Hume insists that "history and experience" should teach us that governments are not founded on popular consent:

I maintain, that human affairs will never admit of this consent; seldom of the appearance of it.  But that conquest or usurpation, that is, in plain terms, force, by dissolving the ancient governments, is the origin of almost all the new ones, which were ever established in the world.  And that in the few cases, where consent may seem to have taken place, it was commonly so irregular, so confined, or so much intermixed either with fraud or violence, that it cannot have any great authority (473-74).

When a new government is established by force through conquest by a foreign power or by usurpation when someone takes power in a society unlawfully, the people are commonly dissatisfied with it, but they obey from fear rather than feeling any moral obligation to obey.  If the new rulers are careful to guard against insurrection, then over time, the people become accustomed to regard the new rulers as the lawful government, even though originally they were usurpers or foreign conquerors.

The original establishment was formed by violence, and submitted to from necessity.  The subsequent administration is also supported by power, and acquiesced in by the people, not as a matter of choice, but of obligation.  They imagine not, that their consent gives their prince a title: But they willingly consent, because they think, that, from long possession, he has acquired a title, independent of their choice or inclination.

Should it be said, that, by living under the dominion of a prince, which one might leave, every individual has given a tacit consent to his authority, and promised him obedience; it may be answered, that such an implied consent can only have place, whee a man imagines, tht the matter depends on his choice.  But where he thinks (as all mankind do who are born under established governments) that by his birth he owes allegiance to a certain prince or certain form of government; it would be absurd to infer a consent or choice, which he expressly, in this case, renounces and disclaims.

Can we seriously say, that a poor peasant or artizan has a free choice to leave his country, when he knows no foreign language or manners, and lives from day to day, by the small wages which he acquires?  We may as well assert, that a man, by remaining in a vessel, freely consents to the dominion of the master; though he was carried on board while asleep, and must leap into the ocean, and perish, the moment he leaves her (475).

Anyone who has read Locke's Second Treatise will know that Locke actually agrees with almost everything Hume says here.  The one clear point of disagreement is that while Hume cannot take seriously "that a poor peasant or artizan has a free choice to leave his country," Locke argued for an open borders immigration policy for England to attract peasant and artisan migration from other European countries that were less free than England.  For example, Locke had seen in 1685, when King Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, which had granted some toleration of Calvinist Protestants in Catholic France in 1598, that this created an exodus of French Protestants, also called Huguenots, who were forced to migrate to England and elsewhere.  As I have argued, this continues today as people want to leave the less free countries and migrate to the freest countries (as measured by the Human Freedom Index).  People vote with their feet for freedom, and that's Lockean consent, or the principle of "love it or leave it."

Locke agrees with Hume's claim that most governments today originally arose from conquest or usurpation.  In his chapter "Of Conquest" (chapter 16), Locke recognizes that "in the noise of War, which makes so great a part of the History of Mankind, this Consent is little taken notice of: And therefore many have mistaken the force of Arms, for the consent of the People; and reckon Conquest as one of the Originals of Government" (ST, 175).  But a conquering power can never erect a new government without the consent of the people, because without their consent, the people will look for an opportunity to overthrow the conqueror, which they can do by an "appeal to Heaven"--that is, war (ST, 176).  Similarly, in his chapter on usurpation, Locke argues that the power of the usurper will not be secure until the people have consented to the lawfulness of his rule.

Now, it is true, as Hume says, that over time the people can become so accustomed or habituated to the rule of conquerors or usurpers that eventually, even though the people have not chosen the conquering or usurping ruler, "they willingly consent, because they think, that, from long possession, he has acquired a title."  Locke agrees with this because he recognizes that many times, maybe most of the time, the people consent to a ruler not by originally choosing him but by their customary acquiescence to his rule: "People are not so easily got out of their old Forms, as some are apt to suggest.  They are hardly to be prevailed with to amend the acknowledged Faults, in the Frame they have been accustomed to" (ST, 223).  The Declaration of Independence expresses the same Lockean thought about the power of customary acceptance of government:  "all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed."

Hume's fundamental agreement with Locke is most clearly manifested in two ways.  What he says about government being founded on opinion coincides with what Locke says about government being founded on consent.  And Hume agrees with Locke in saying that the only remedy for tyranny is resistance.

At the beginning of his essay "Of the First Principles of Government," Hume observes:

Nothing appears more surprising to those, who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and the implicit submission, with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers.  When we enquire by what means this wonder is effected, we shall find, that, as FORCE is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion.  It is therefore, on opinion only that government is founded; and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments, as well as to the most free and most popular.  The soldan of EGYPT, or the emperor of ROME, might drive his harmless subjects, like brute beasts, against their sentiments and inclination: But he must, at least, have led his mamalukes, or praetorian bands, like men, by their opinion (32-33).

He then distinguishes two kinds of opinion.  The "opinion of INTEREST" is the sense of the government's general advantage.  "When this opinion prevails among the generality of a state, or among those who have the force in their hands, it gives great security to any government."

The "opinion of RIGHT" is either the "right to POWER" or the "right to PROPERTY."  The opinion that the government has a right to power is most commonly rooted in the attachment that a nation has to its ancient government because antiquity begets the opinion of right.  The opinion of the right to property is the sense that the governmental power of those with property is justified by their right to property.

What I see here is what some social scientists today call the theory of the minimum winning coalition.  No ruler can rule alone.  Even an absolute dictator needs a small coalition of powerful people who are loyal to him, and to win and maintain that loyalty, the dictator must buy them off with money and status.  Once a dictator is abandoned by his loyalists, he loses his power.  Strictly speaking, therefore, "one-man rule" is impossible.  But as long as he has the support of that small winning coalition, he can rule successfully even when he oppresses the great majority of the people under his rule.  The private interest of his small coalition of supporters is advanced at the expense of the public interest of the people at large.

A democratic leader differs from a dictatorial leader in that the democratic leader depends on a larger coalition of supporters.  Because of the large size of a winning democratic coalition, democratic leaders must persuade a large number of supporters that he will advance public policies that serve the general welfare of this big coalition.  But still this large democratic coalition is less than the whole community, and it does not have to be a majority of the citizens.  So, for example, the minimum winning coalition for a president of the United States is a majority in the Electoral College and at least one third of the Senate voting against impeachment.

To say that every government depends on the opinion of a minimum winning coalition supporting the rulers is to say that every government depends on consent, but that consenting coalition can be small in a dictatorship or large in a democracy.  However, as Machiavelli saw, even when the prince depends on a small coalition among the "great"--the ambitious few--he must avoid becoming hated by the many, because when the prince is hated by the multitude of the people this creates opportunities for conspiratorial plots to overthrow or kill him.  This is what Hume and Locke call "resistance" to the government.

Once Hume has attacked Locke's Whig doctrine of government by consent of the governed in his essay "Of the Original Contract," it is surprising that in the next essay "Of Passive Obedience," Hume endorses the Whig doctrine of resistance and criticizes the Tory doctrine of passive obedience.  While Hume agrees that "obedience is our duty in the common course of things," resistance is the only remedy "in extraordinary emergencies . . . when the public is in the highest danger, from violence and tyranny" (490).

Hume does not recognize that if resistance to a tyrannical government is withdrawal of consent because the people have never consented to government becoming tyrannical, that implies that government depends on the consent of the governed, just as Locke claimed (ST, 199-210).

As I have argued, the evolution of Lockean natural punishment of despots from foraging societies to the present show two kinds of resistance to despotic rule--violent and nonviolent.  And if Hume had studied carefully the history of the American colonies during his lifetime, he would have seen both kinds of resistance.  From 1761 to 1774, there was a "revolution in the minds of the people," as John Adams described it when the Americans engaged in nonviolent resistance to British rule over them, long before the violent resistance began at Lexington and Concord in 1774, which was formally declared in the Declaration of Independence a few months before Hume's death in 1776.  This was the American "Appeal to Heaven"--the appeal to the God of Battles.

We have to hope that Americans today will not have to resort to violent resistance to overthrow Trump's tyranny as the Red Caesar.

But in any case, we should be clear that in the first few months of his new term, Trump is showing all the traits of a tyrannical Red Caesar as described by Michael Anton.  Trump has chosen one of the two routes to Caesarism--being elected to office legally and then refusing to leave the office.  He has already said that he will suspend the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution that limits a president to two terms.  And Trump is clearly following the plan for the Red Caesar laid out by Anton, who explained:  "Caesarism is a particular form of one-man rule: halfway, as it were, between monarchy and tyranny.  It is monarchical in that a single person rules.  It is tyrannical in that there is no appeal; Caesar's word replaces constitutionalism and even, in the final analysis, law."  Caesarism, therefore, can be defined as "authoritarian one-man rule partially legitimized by necessity," where that necessity is the breakdown of the republican, constitutional order caused by the people becoming so corrupt that they lack the republican virtues required for liberty.

Trump's Caesarism clearly satisfies Locke's classic definition of tyranny.  "Tyranny is the exercise of power beyond right."  Because the tyrant "makes not the law, but his will, the rule; and his commands and actions are not directed to the preservation of the properties of his people, but the satisfaction of his own ambition, revenge, covetousness, or any other irregular passion" (ST, 199).

A nonviolent resistance movement against Trump's tyranny will have to break up his minimum winning coalition.  The crucial issue for Trump voters last November was high inflation attributed to "Bidenomics."  Now Trump's economic policies--particularly, higher tariffs--are going to drive prices up and create an economic recession.  So, while the "opinion of interest"--the belief of many Trump voters that Trump's election was in their economic self-interest--favored Trump in November, it is now becoming clear that the grandiose narcissism of Trump's tyrannical drive to economic ruin for America and even the whole world is not serving the self-interest of those voters.  

According to Michael Anton, one of the benefits of Caesarism is that it can preserve and even enhance the economic achievements of a great civilization.  But Trump's Caesarism is driving America to economic disaster.

Similarly, those Trump voters are discovering that Elon Musk's chaotic disruption of the "administrative state" is not in the self-interest of Americans who depend upon the services provided by federal administrative employees.

But ultimately the key to the success of a nonviolent resistance movement against Trump will probably be the "opinion of right":  Will most Americans decide that Trump does not have the moral or legal right to tyrannically violate their natural and constitutional rights to life, liberty, and property?  So, for example, will Americans agree that it is right that Trump suspend the individual right of due process of law in violation of court orders?

Anton has admitted that the great cost of Caesarism is the loss of liberty.  But he insists that when Caesarism comes to America, it's because liberty has already been lost, and the American people will show passive obedience to the Red Caesar because of the many benefits of his tyranny that outweigh the loss of liberty.  

Is that true?  Or will the American people show active resistance to Trump's Caesarism because it neither serves their interests nor secures their rights?

Moreover, we should remember that when Anton explains Caesarism as a tyrant's defense of the people against the ruling class, he admits that in Trump's America, the people are divided between Blue America and Red America.  So while Red America loves Trump.  Blue America hates him.

Another problem with Anton's analysis is that it's not clear that Trump is defending Red America against the ruling class.  At Trump's inauguration, in the prominent front row audience immediately behind Trump, the seats were filled by a half dozen tech CEO billionaires who are the richest human beings on the Earth.  And of course, one of them--Elon Musk--has been given tyrannical rule over the whole federal government.  If these are to become the new oligarchic rulers of America, then it seems that Trump's Caesarism is on the side of the ruling class.  And surely this is not what Red America voted for.

It's possible that we will soon see not only Blue America but also much of Red America united in active resistance to Trump's Red Caesar tyranny.

Evolutionary Group Selection for Freedom Through Migration and Assimilation: Responding to Nicholas Wade

I have often argued that cultural group selection through migration and assimilation favors Lockean liberal regimes.  Human beings "vote with their feet" in that they tend to move from poorer, violent, and exploitative societies into richer, peaceful, and more just societies.  And thus immigration tends to promote the spread of ideas and institutions that favor prosperity, peace, and justice.  Beginning in the 18th century, classical liberal regimes based on Lockean political thought--like Great Britain and the United States--have attracted immigrants because of the prosperity, peace, and justice that liberal regimes promote.   

This explains why John Locke argued for England having a policy of open borders and general naturalization of immigrants.  Some people objected to Locke's position by claiming that immigrants would not be assimilated into English society.  Locke responded by saying that once immigrants are naturalized,

they are then in interest as much our own people as any.  The only odds is their language, which will be cured too in their children, and they be as perfect Englishmen as those that have been here ever since William the Conqueror's days and came over with him.  For 'tis hardly to be doubted but that most of even our ancestors were foreigners (1997, 325).

If immigrants do not speak English, that will impede their assimilation into English culture, but their children will speak English and thus become "perfect Englishmen."  After all, most Englishmen are descended from foreign ancestors.

Notice also that contrary to the claims of the illiberal nationalists, Lockean liberalism can recognize the importance of the national identities that distinguish one people from another, because here Locke recognizes the cultural identity of the English people as a distinct nation rooted in the English language and other cultural traditions that have emerged from the cultural history of England.

Evolutionary theorists--such as Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson--have seen that Locke was right about immigration, and that cultural group selection working through selective migration and assimilation has favored the spread of Lockean liberal culture around the world (Boyd & Richerson 2009; Richerson & Boyd 2008).  This confirms what I have argued in various posts about the evolutionary history of Lockean liberalism as symbolic niche construction.

But against this, Nicholas Wade warns--in his new book The Origin of Politics: How Evolution and Ideology Shape the Fate of Nations--that when immigrants fail to assimilate into their new society, they create a cultural diversity that weakens the social cohesion necessary for any stable social order.

Social cohesion is inevitably weakened by any influx of people who don't share the socially bonding attributes of the residents, such as language, religion, and ethnicity.  And the weakening of social cohesion is deeply feared, even if at a level that many people cannot articulate, because it undermines the strength of a society and hence the chances of its members' survival (173).

Here Wade repeats one of the primary arguments made by nationalist conservatives like Yoram Hazony and J.D. Vance for why immigration needs to be severely restricted.

But where's the evidence that most immigrants cannot or will not assimilate and therefore threaten social cohesion?  Wade's only evidence for this is a study by Robert Putnam (2007).  Putnam wanted to study how the cultural diversity in the United States caused by immigration might affect "social capital" (defined as social networks and the associated norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness).  He collected survey data from interviews of people living in 41 very different communities ranging from large cities like Los Angeles and Boston to small towns and rural areas like Yakima, Washington, and rural South Dakota.  People were asked "Do you trust the people in your neighborhood?"  He found that people living in ethnically homogeneous communities (like Lewiston, Maine) were more trusting of their neighbors than were people living in ethnically heterogeneous communities (like San Francisco).  He also found that people in ethnically diverse communities were less likely to volunteer to work on community projects than were people in ethnically homogeneous communities.

Putnam summarized his conclusions in a passage quoted by Wade:

Inhabitants of diverse communities tend to withdraw from collective life, to distrust their neighbors, regardless of the color of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more, but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television. . . . Diversity, at least in the short run, seems to bring out the turtle in all of us (Putnam 2007:150-151; Wade 2025:174).

But notice Putnam's qualification suggested by the phrase "at least in the short run."  In fact, much of Putnam's paper is devoted to arguing that in the long run, "successful immigrant societies have overcome . . . fragmentation by creating new, cross-cutting forms of social solidarity and more encompassing identities" (137).

Wade casually dismisses this side of Putnam's argument: "Though Putnam expressed the hope that in the long run the negative effects of diversity would disappear, his work provided a frank and rare description of the formidable problems raised by immigration" (174).  But Putnam didn't just express the "hope" that this could be done, because he surveyed some of the evidence from the history of American immigration during the period of almost open borders--from around 1820 to around 1920--that showed immigrants assimilating into American society.  Irish, Italian, and Polish Catholics, Russian Jews, and others were integrated into an American society that had once been a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP)-dominated society.  In the short run, the first generation of immigrants tended to "hunker down" in their own cultural enclaves, set apart from the dominant American culture.  But in the long run, the children and grandchildren of these first-generation immigrants assimilated into American culture or into a new more expansive American identity that could include Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, Jewish Americans, and other hyphenated Americans.

Wade concedes that the many European immigrants--Irish, German, Southern, and Eastern Europeans--who arrived in America before World War I "assimilated, at least by the second generation, to their new community," and consequently there was "a high degree of cohesion" (179, 209).  "But cohesion has ebbed significantly over the last half century," Wade claims.  "Rising and more visible gaps in wealth, high fluxes of immigration with poor assimilation, and the advent of identity politics have stretched and torn the social fabric" (209).  Wade thus implies that over the past fifty years, the children of immigrants are no longer assimilating into American culture as they did a hundred years ago.

But Wade offers no evidence for this claim.  And in fact, there is lots of evidence against it.  For example, Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan (2022, 2024) have used historical US Census data to show that the socioeconomic assimilation of immigrants through upward mobility is just as possible for immigrants today as it was in the early 20th century.  In the late 19th and early 20th century, sons born to US-born parents in the 25th percentile of the income distribution (the income level below which 25 percent of individuals earn) rose to the 40th percentile as adults on average.  Most children of immigrants performed much better as adult earners--with children of immigrant Portuguese or Italian parents reaching the 60th percentile as adults.  A hundred years later, we see the same pattern.  Sons (or daughters) born in 1980 to US-born parents in the 25th percentile of the income distribution reach just above the 45th percentile (for sons) and 40th percentile (for daughters) as adults.  Children of immigrant parents do better than this.  Children of parents from Hong Kong, China, and India reach, on average, almost the 65th percentile as adults.  The second-generation of immigrants continue to assimilate into the American middle-class culture.

The most radical form of assimilation of immigrants is intermarriage across ethnic, racial, and religious boundaries (Drouhot and Nee 2019:181).  Intermarriage rates--immigrants marrying native Americans with different ethnic, racial, and religious identities--have been rising steadily since the 1980s in the United States.  Few Americans today remember the days in the 1950s when young men and women were expected to marry within their ethnic, racial, and religious groups.

Previously, I have written about the importance of assimilation through intermarriage for the Darwinian evolution of Indigenous Americans through genetic and cultural hybridization that has made America a multiethnic nation--or what Frederick Douglass called "the composite nation."

In his earlier book--A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History--Wade argued that while "races are a way station on the path through which evolution generates new species. . . . the forces of differentiation seem now to have reversed course due to increased migration, travel, and intermarriage" (71).

But now there's another question at issue here: what exactly is motivating these immigrants to undertake the extraordinary sacrifices that come with their efforts to immigrate to the United States, Canada, and the European nation-states?  Wade's answer is that they are attracted by "Western culture," which can be a "common culture" for "people of all ethnicities and cultures" (210).  But he doesn't specify the meaning of that "Western culture" that attracts so many immigrants.

Wade does point, however, to what Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson have called the "inclusive institutions" achieved first in the British Glorious Revolution of 1688--overturning the "extractive institutions" of the oppressive regimes that had dominated human history for so long--as the highest development of Western culture (Wade 2014:148, 193-196; Wade 2025:98-100).  Those "inclusive institutions"--impartial rule of law, property rights, personal freedom, religious freedom, political freedom, and limited government--sound like Lockean liberalism to me.  

So when immigrants "vote with their feet" for Western culture, they're voting for the Lockean liberal social order.  That's what I would identify as evolutionary group selection for freedom through migration and assimilation.

REFERENCES

Abramitzky, Ran, and Leah Bouston. 2022. Streets of Gold: America's Untold Story of Immigrant Success. New York: PublicAffairs.

Abramitzky, Ran, and Leah Bouston. 2024. "Immigrants and Their Children Assimilate into U.S. Society and the U.S. Economy, Both in the Past and Today." PNAS Nexus, pgae344.

Acemoglu, Daron, and James A. Robinson. 2012. Why Nations Fail. New York: Crown Publishing Group.

Boyd, Robert, and Peter Richerson. 2009. "Voting With Your Feet: Payoff Biased Migration and the Evolution of Group Beneficial Behavior." Journal of Theoretical Biology 257:331-339.

Drouhot, Lucas, and Victor Nee. 2019. "Assimilation and the Second Generation in Europe and America: Blending and Segregating Social Dynamics Between Immigrants and Natives." Annual Review of Sociology 45:177-199.

Locke, John. 1997. Political Essays, ed. Mark Goldie. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Putnam, Robert. 2007.  " E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-First Century: The 2006 John Skytte Prize Lecture." Scandinavian Political Studies 30:137-174.

Richerson, Peter, and Robert Boyd. 2008. "The Evolution of Free Enterprise Values." In Paul Zak, ed, Moral Markets: The Critical Role of Values in the Economy, 107-141. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Wade, Nicholas. 2014. A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History. New York: Penguin Press.

Wade, Nicholas. 2025. The Origin of Politics: How Evolution and Ideology Shape the Fate of Nations. New York: Harper.

Open Borders Would Make America Great Again

This is a slightly revised version of an essay that I originally posted in August.

President Trump is trying to end illegal immigration by closing the borders to illegal immigrants and by deporting all of the 16 million or more illegal immigrants now in the U.S.  To do this, he has mobilized tens of thousands of police officers (Border Patrol and ICE) and military personnel across the country to enforce his directives; and in many cases, people have been arrested, detained, and deported without constitutional due process of law.  This looks like a police state and a military dictatorship.

The better way to end illegal immigration would be to make immigration legal.  U.S. borders should be open to all immigrants who satisfy certain minimal criteria.  And illegal immigrants already in the U.S. should be provided a pathway to legal resident status.  Those with a criminal record and those unable to support themselves economically should be deported.

This would not violate anyone's constitutional rights.  And this would respect the natural human right to freedom of trade:  people have the right to engage in any voluntary exchange that is mutually beneficial as long as it does not unduly harm any third parties.  This freedom of trade includes not only goods but also services and labor.  If a foreigner wants to accept a job offer from a willing American employer, or rent an apartment from a willing landlord, no one has any right to stop them.  These are contracts between consenting adults.  When governments restrict immigration, they're barring free trade between natives and foreigners.  This not only denies our freedom to trade, but it also deprives us of the wealth that would be created by such trade.  Some economists have estimated that completely free immigration would double the GDP of the global economy, which would mean that there would be almost no poverty in the world (Clemens 2011).

Now, of course, there is one problem here in what I have just said.  People have the right to engage in free trade--voluntary exchanges that are mutually beneficial to both parties--but only on the condition that this does not severely harm any third parties--creating what economists call "negative externalities."  Governments use their coercive powers to prevent free immigration because many people believe that free immigration has large externalities.  

People think free immigration would be economically harmful because low-skilled immigrant workers lower the average standard of living for native workers.  People also think immigrants benefit from government services and welfare state programs in ways that burden native taxpayers.  And don't many immigrants become dangerous criminals and terrorists?  Don't these immigrants also introduce foreign cultural beliefs and practices that undermine and even dissolve the national culture of the native people?

I will respond to these objections in future posts.  But here I only want to make the point that during the colonial settlement of America and then during the first one hundred and fifty years of American national independence, America had virtually open borders; and it was during that latter period that the United States became the richest and most powerful nation in the world.  So, if Americans want to Make America Great Again, they will have to once again open their borders to immigrants.

OPEN BORDERS IN COLONIAL AMERICA

Although we all know that the American colonists were immigrants, most of us do not appreciate the stunning scale and diversity of that movement of immigrants to colonial America, which shows the attractiveness of America for immigrants and the lack of restrictions on immigration.  In the fifteen years between the end of the Seven Years War and the Revolution--1760 to 1775--approximately 125,000 people from the British Isles immigrated to America (55,000 Irish, 40,000 Scots, and 30,000 Englishmen).  There were also at least 12,000 immigrants from the German states and Switzerland, and 84,500 enslaved Africans forcibly imported to the southern colonies.  This total of 221,500 arrivals in this fifteen-year period was almost 10 percent of the population of America in 1775, which means an annual entry of about 15,000 people, which was close to the population of Boston during these years (Bailyn 1986a, 9; 1986b, 26).

Moreover, this movement of immigrants was multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, multi-religious, and multi-lingual.  Historian Bernard Bailyn describes it as "a composite of ethnic and religious groups--Germans, French, Swiss, Scotch, Scotch-Irish, English, Caribbean islanders, Africans, Afro-Americans--carrying with them different cultural baggage, different patterns of family organization and discipline, different ways of working and living together" (1986a, 59).  10 percent of the pre-Revolutionary population was German-speaking.  In Georgia, "the colony was so polyglot that a successful magistrate needed to speak fluently in at least three languages and preferably four" (1986a, 17).

The American colonists knew that this openness to immigration was crucial for their economic and social growth.  At the same time, some British leaders worried that the immigration to America would weaken Great Britain through depopulation, and there were attempts to restrict immigration to the colonies.  

In the Declaration of Independence, this was one of the grievances against the King: "He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws of Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands" (para. 9).  This is a complaint against British efforts to veto colonial legislation for assisting and encouraging immigration and British policies for limiting land grants to immigrants (Bailyn 1986b, 55-56). 

THE AMERICAN NATION'S OPEN BORDERS, 1789-1921

When the Constitution was ratified in 1789, immigration had made the United States the most ethnically, racially, and religiously diverse society in the Western world.  The Constitution's enumeration of congressional powers did not include any general power to regulate immigration, but it did include a power over naturalizing immigrants as citizens: "to establish a Uniform Rule of Naturalization" (Art. I, Sec. 8, Cl. 4).  The Constitution also required citizenship as a qualification for some of the officers of the national government.  No one could be a member of the House of Representatives who had not been a citizen of the United States for at least seven years.  Senators had to have been a citizen for at least nine years.  And the presidency was restricted to only natural-born citizens.

The First Congress established the first uniform rule of naturalization through the Naturalization Act of 1790.  The Act provided that (1) any alien being "a free white person," (2) who has resided in the United States for two years shall become a naturalized citizen after proving to a court that (3) he is "a person of good character," and (4) after taking an oath or affirmation to support the Constitution of the United States.

This Act also provided that the children of such naturalized citizens being under the age of 21 years shall be considered citizens of the United States, and that the children of citizens of the United States born out of the limits of the United States shall be considered natural born citizens.

In 1795, Congress amended this law to require that a declaration of intent to become a citizen must be submitted at least three years before naturalization, and to extend the minimum residence requirement to five years.

In 1798, as part of the Alien and Sedition Acts, a Congress controlled by the Federalist Party lengthened the period for the declaration of intent to five years, lengthened the residence requirement to fourteen years, and barred the naturalization of any alien from a country at war with the United States.

In 1802, after the victory of Thomas Jefferson and his Democratic-Republican Party in the election of 1800, the Congress repealed the previous laws and restored both the five-year residence requirement and the three-year declaration of intent period.

The critical point to notice here is that although the Congress limited naturalization to "free white persons," it did not limit the entry of immigrants who became residents but not citizens.  (The Naturalization Act of 1870 extended eligibility for naturalization to African Americans.)

From 1789 to 1875, the borders of the United States were completely open to immigrants.  Then, from 1875 to 1921, the borders were largely open with a few exceptions.  In 1875, the Congress prohibited the immigration of convicts, East Asian women, and indentured servants.  In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which did indeed exclude Chinese from immigrating to the United States.  This was the one big exception to the rule of open borders.

Between 1820 and 1924, 36 million people immigrated to the United States.  If their American-born descendants are added to this number, this would account for most of the growth in the U.S. population during this period--from 9.6 million in 1820 to 106 million in 1920.

The most severe restrictions on immigration began in 1921 with the Emergency Quota Act and in 1924 with the National Origins Quota Act, which set very low quotas for European immigration, particularly for Southern and Eastern Europe.  Those who wrote and supported this legislation (like the Ku Klux Klan) were clear that they wanted to protect the racial purity of the "American stock" from the degeneration of Catholics and Jews.  The total immigration quota of 165,000 for countries outside the Western Hemisphere was an 80% reduction from the average before World War I.  Remarkably, however, there were no restrictions on Mexican or Hispanic immigration from Central America and South America.

The 1924 Act also created the U.S. Border Patrol and established a consular control system that allowed entry only to those who obtained a visa from a U.S. consulate.

The 1924 Act was revised by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 and finally replaced by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which went into effect in 1968.  Although this established a more liberal immigration system than the 1924 Act, the 1965 Act was still much more restrictive than the open immigration system of the nineteenth century.  Since 1968, the average inflow of immigrants per year in proportion to the resident population was more than double what it had been from 1922 to 1967, but this was still less than half the inflow of immigrants from 1820 to 1921 (Nowrasteh and Powell 2021, 193).

IMMIGRANTS IN LINCOLN'S NEW BIRTH OF FREEDOM

Scottish, Swedish, German, Irish, and French Soldiers of the Union Army at the Siege of Corinth, Mississippi, 1862

From 1830 to 1860, ten million foreign born people crossed America's open borders and settled in the United States.  This made them one-third of the total 30 million Americans in 1860.  That was a critical turning point in American history because this huge migration decided the outcome of the deepest crisis in American political culture.  

In the presidential election of 1860, Abraham Lincoln's victory depended upon his winning a large portion of the immigrant vote--particularly, the Germans, who were staunchly anti-slavery.  Lincoln won the Northwestern states of Illinois, Ohio, Wisconsin, Indiana, and Iowa by winning huge majorities in German districts (Holzer 2024, 133-36, 144-45).  Again, in the election of 1864, Lincoln won reelection with the support of German voters (Holzer 2024, 303-20).

In response to Lincoln's election in 1860, the secessionist Southern States left the Union and started the Civil War a few weeks after Lincoln's inauguration because they saw this as the only way to preserve slavery.  As I have indicated in previous posts, the Civil War can be seen as a war over the interpretation of the Declaration of Independence--over whether the declaration that "all men are created equal" in their rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" really includes all men of all races, or whether it includes only "the white race," or perhaps only the British people.

In a speech in Springfield, Illinois, on June 12, 1857, Stephen Douglas argued that the framers of the Declaration of Independence surely did not include the "African race" in its principle of equality.  Rather, what they meant was "that they referred to the white race alone, and not to the African, when they declared to have been created equal--that they were speaking of British subjects on this continent being equal to British subjects born and residing in Great Britain--that they were entitled to the same inalienable rights, and among them were enumerated life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" (Douglas 1857, 9).

Two weeks later, Lincoln spoke in Springfield.  He quoted the passage above from Douglas's speech, and he remarked: "Why, according to this, not only negroes but white people outside of Great Britain and America are not spoken of in that instrument.  The English, Irish, and Scotch, along with white Americans, were included to be sure, but the French, Germans, and other white people of the world are all gone to pot along with the Judge's inferior races."  Against this, Lincoln insisted that the Declaration of Independence really did extend its principle of equality to "all men" or "the whole human family," which would encompass all races, including all Europeans (Lincoln 1989, 1:398-99).

It should be noted, however, that one year later, Douglas began to speak of the "white basis" of government as "confining citizenship to white men, men of European birth and descent, instead of conferring it upon negroes, Indians, and other inferior races" (Lincoln 1989, 1:504).  So, this indicated that he was no longer confining the principle of equality of rights to the British people.

On July 10, 1858, Lincoln delivered a speech at Chicago that stated the arguments that he would develop in his debates with Douglas that would begin a month later; and his fundamental argument was about the principle of equality of rights in the Declaration as embracing all Americans and including both black Americans and foreign immigrants.  When we celebrate the Fourth of July, he said, we celebrate the men of 1776--"a race of men living in that day whom we claim as our fathers and grandfathers."  But we also realize that of the 30 million American people of today, many are not descended by blood from those first Americans.  We have

. . . perhaps half our people who are not descendants at all of these men, they are men who have come from Europe--German, Irish, French, and Scandinavian--men that have come from Europe themselves, or whose ancestors have come hither and settled here, finding themselves our equals in all things.  If they look back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none, they cannot carry themselves back into that glorious epoch and make themselves feel that they ae part of us, but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal," and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are.  That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world (Lincoln 1989, 1:456).

This leads him to the conclusion of his speech--that we should reject all talk about "inferior races": "let us discard all this quibbling about this man and the other man--this race and that race and the other race being inferior, and therefore they must be placed in an inferior position--discarding our standard that we have left us.  Let us discard all these things, and unite as one people throughout the land, until we shall once again stand up declaring that all men are created equal."

So, what unites the native-born Americans and the foreign-born Americans as "one people" is their patriotic love of America and their affirming the universal principle of the Declaration of Independence that all human beings are born free and equal.  What makes Americans Americans is their moral character as "patriotic and liberty-loving men."

In the Civil War, Lincoln made it clear that enforcing the Declaration's principle of equality of rights as the "standard maxim for free society" would require not only emancipating the black slaves but also promoting free immigration into the United States.  And once Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, it became clear that a victory for the Union in that war would be a victory for this expansive interpretation of the Declaration of Independence.

Remarkably, the eventual Union victory depended in large degree on the millions of immigrants who had entered the United States under the open borders policy.  The key to Lincoln's strategy for defeating the Confederacy was exploiting the advantage of the Union in its greater numbers of soldiers--over twice as many as the Confederates.  This was due to the greater population of the Northern states, which gave them a greater pool of potential military recruits.  Not only was the Confederacy weakened by its small total population--about one-third that of the Union--but as a slave society, the Confederacy lacked access to 40 percent of its adult male military-age population, who were enslaved and thus not eligible for service.  This left about 965,000 free white men between the ages of 18 to 45 to draw on for military service.  But then, of course, not every adult white man could serve.  This meant that at most the Confederacy could put an army of no more than about five hundred thousand men in the field (McCurry 2010).

The greater population of the North can be explained as largely the consequence of the liberal social order in the North that had attracted millions of immigrants from overseas and many migrants from the South.  The comparatively open and free society of the North offered more opportunities for people seeking a better life than did the illiberal South where slaves did most of the work.  As Lincoln said, in the free states, an ambitious man "can better his condition" because "there is no such thing as a freeman being fatally fixed for life, in the condition of a hired laborer" (1989, 2:144).  Of the ten million overseas immigrants to the United States who entered from the 1830s to the 1850s, most of them (about seven-eighths) settled in the North.  Also, the migration of white Southerners to the North was three times greater than the migration from the North to the South.  Over 40 percent of the Union's armed forces were immigrants and the sons of immigrants--totaling about 600,000 out of 2.1 million.  The Confederacy had only a few thousand immigrants fighting for them (Doyle 2015, 158-81).

At the epic Battle of Gettysburg, in Pennsylvania, July 1-3, 1863, there were Irish troops fighting on both sides.  On the side of the Union was New York's 69th Infantry Regiment, the Fighting Irish, who played a key role in turning the tide of battle.  On the second day of fighting, July 2nd, the Irish Brigade chaplain Father William Corby (later to become President of the University of Notre Dame) stood upon a large rock in front of the brigade to offer general absolution for the Catholic troops.  Artist Paul Henry Wood painted a depiction of this legendary religious service based on memories of some surviving soldiers who were there.

An eyewitness recalled that "Father Corby reminded the soldiers of the high and sacred nature of their trust and the noble object for which they fought."  When he finished his remarks, all the men (both Catholic and Protestant) fell to their knees and prayed for God's merciful absolution.  The sounds of battle resonated all around them.  For many of them this would be their last prayer.

On the decisive third day of battle, July 3, the Irish units defended the center of the Union's position on Cemetery Ridge against the largest assault of the entire war:  General Robert E. Lee ordered General George Pickett to lead his men in a charge across almost a mile of open land, where the Rebels were exposed to the fire of Union troops, but with the hope that if the Rebels broke through the Union lines, this would give the Confederates a victory in the North that could be the decisive turn in the war.  

The Union Irishmen held their ground.  One veteran described it years later: they "stood immovable, unconquerable, fearless and splendid in their valor, the green flag waving side by side with the colors of their adopted country, both held aloft by the stone wall until the victory was assured, and the hosts of the enemy crushed."  Of the 532 men in the Irish Brigade, 198 were lost at Gettysburg, a casualty rate close to 40 percent (Holzer 2024, 270-72).

On November 20, 1863, Lincoln spoke at Gettysburg to dedicate a cemetery for the over 7,000 men--both Union and Confederate--who had fallen in those three days of battle.  He explained that those who had died on that battlefield had given their lives that the new American nation might live as the nation conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that are men are created equal.

It was for us the living, he added, to be dedicated to the unfinished work for which they died--"that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom--and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

Only nineteen days later, Lincoln submitted his Annual Message to Congress, which indicated that the "new birth of freedom" would require not only the Reconstruction of the Southern States with emancipation of the slaves but also a new system for encouraging free immigration.

I again submit to your consideration the expediency of establishing a system for the encouragement of immigration.  Although this source of national wealth and strength is again flowing with greater freedom than for several years before the insurrection occurred, there is still a great deficiency of laborers in every field of industry, especially in agriculture and in our mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals.  While the demand for labor is thus increased here, tens of thousands of persons, destitute of remunerative occupation, are thronging our foreign consulates, and offering to emigrate to the United States if essential, but very cheap, assistance can be afforded them.  It is easy to see that, under the sharp discipline of civil war, the nation is beginning a new life.  This noble effort demands the aid, and ought to receive the attention and support of the government (Lincoln 1989, 2:541-42).

Notice that Lincoln saw immigration as a "source of national wealth and strength," particularly in satisfying the "demand for labor" at a time when the Civil War had created a severe labor shortage.  Notice also that he saw promoting immigration as especially important because "under the sharp discipline of civil war, the nation is beginning a new life"--the "new birth of freedom" that he foresaw at Gettysburg.

Lincoln wanted the government to allocate federal funding to assist immigrants who were "destitute of remunerative occupation" in foreign countries.  Although the Congress did not approve this proposal for direct funding of immigrants, the Congress did approve extending the benefits of the 1862 Homestead Act for foreign immigrants.  Congress also authorized the setting up of a Immigration Bureau in the State Department.  And the U.S. Emigrant Office in New York was authorized to help foreign workers find American jobs and arrange transportation for them (Holzer 2024, 288-98).  Lincoln signed the Act for the Encouragement of Immigration on July 4, 1864.

But Lincoln wanted more to be done for facilitating more immigration.  The 1864 Republican Party Platform resolved that "foreign immigration, which in the past has added so much to the wealth, development of resources and increase of power to the nation, the asylum of the oppressed of all nations, should be fostered and encouraged by a liberal and just policy" (Holzer 2024, 304).  In his Annual Message to Congress of December 6, 1864, Lincoln observed that the previously passed act for encouraging immigration

seems to need amendment which will enable the officers of the government to prevent the practice of frauds against the immigrants while on their way and on their arrival in the ports, so as to secure them here a free choice of avocations and places of settlement.  A liberal disposition towards this great national policy is manifested by most of the European States, and ought to be reciprocated on our part by giving the immigrants effective national protection.  I regard our emigrants as one of the replenishing streams which are appointed by Providence to repair the ravages of internal war, and its wastes of national strength and health.  All that is necessary is to secure the flow of that stream in its present fulness, and to that end the government must, in every way, make it manifest that it neither needs nor designs to impose involuntary military service upon those who come from other lands to cast their lot in our country (Lincoln 1989, 2:650).

It is remarkable that Lincoln wanted immigrants to be exempt from the national military conscription act that Congress had passed in 1863.  Although the great majority of Union soldiers were volunteers, the military draft was supposed to fill in when voluntary enlistments fell short.  Conscription was very unpopular, even provoking draft riots.  So Lincoln's offering exemption from the draft as an incentive for immigration shows how important free immigration was for him.

Perhaps even more impressive is how Lincoln saw immigration as ordained by God--"appointed by Providence" to be a "replenishing stream" to restore "national strength and health."

Isn't there enough evidence here to justify Trump and Vance in denouncing Lincoln as a crazy globalist and woke advocate of open borders? 

OPEN BORDERS AS CULTURAL GROUP SELECTION FOR FREEDOM

As I have argued previously, global human migration shows what evolutionary scientists call cultural group selection through migration and assimilation, in which countries with cultural traditions of freedom have higher fitness than countries that are less free.  John Locke understood this, which is why he argued that free societies benefited from having open borders, so that they could attract migrants from less free societies.  The freer societies with a growing population of productive and inventive people become the more prosperous societies.  While countries like New Zealand have adopted the Lockean liberal immigration policy, the United States under the rule of Trump the Nationalist is raising barriers to immigration, which means that if the United States continues to move away from Lockean liberalism, it will become a loser in this evolutionary process of cultural group selection, in which people vote with their feet in favor of freedom.

Not too far off Ellis Island in New York's harbor stands the Statue of Liberty, erected in 1886.  Lady Liberty holds a tablet in her left arm inscribed with a date--"July IV MDCCLXXVI"--that invokes the Declaration of Independence.  A poem is engraved at its base: "Give me your tired, your poor/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free . . ."  Notice that the only qualification for entry to America is that the immigrants "yearn to breathe free." By 1886, the annual number of immigrants entering the United States was approaching one million.

Lady Liberty is a globalist!

So we can expect that Trump will soon sign an executive order for replacing the Statue of Liberty with the Statue of Closed Borders.  Instead of Lady Liberty with her torch held high, we will have a burly masked ICE officer clubbing an immigrant. 

REFERENCES

Bailyn, Bernard. 1986a. The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction. New York: Random House.

Bailyn, Bernard. 1986b. Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution. New York: Random House.

Clemens, Michael. 2011. "Economics and Emigration: Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk?" Journal of Economic Perspectives 25: 83-106.

Douglas, Stephen. 1857. Remarks of the Hon. Stephen Douglas, on Kansas, Utah, and the Dred Scott Decision. Chicago: Daily Times Book Office.

Doyle, Don H. 2015. The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War. New York: Basic Books.

Holzer, Harold. 2024. Brought Forth On This Continent: Abraham Lincoln and American Immigration. New York: Dutton.

Lincoln, Abraham. 1989. Speeches and Writings. 2 vols. Ed. Don Fehrenbacher. New York: Library of America.

McCurry, Stephanie. 2010. Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Nowrasteh, Alex, and Benjamin Powell. 2021. Wretched Refuse? The Political Economy of Immigration and Institutions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Seeing Abraham Lincoln in Donald Trump's Soul--The Strange Fantasy of the Claremont Institute

In the spring 2019 issue of The Claremont Review of Books, the cover essay is by Thomas Klingenstein--"Patriotism vs. Multiculturalism."  Speaking as the chairman of the Claremont Institute's Board of Directors, he declares what must be the official Claremont Institute position that Abraham Lincoln has been reincarnated in the soul of Donald Trump:

"Trump may not be able to express as well as one might like what makes America great but in his soul he knows what not so long ago our elite knew, that we are the 'almost chosen' people (in Abraham Lincoln's quaint, humble phrase) dedicated to the proposition that 'all men are created equal,' here to show the rest of the world that man can govern himself."

There are three claims here.  First, that Trump has a soul.  Second, that he is unable to clearly express what he knows in his soul.  Finally, that those who know the political thought of Abraham Lincoln can see Lincoln's thought in Trump's soul--particularly, Lincoln's appeal to the Declaration of Independence as affirming the principle of the equal liberty of all human beings as the moral standard for the American regime.  Against the evils of multiculturalism, Trump knows in his Lincolnian soul that America needs "to unite around a single, national political culture based on natural rights, individual freedom, and republican government."

Against these claims, Tony Schwartz, the ghostwriter of Trump's book The Art of the Deal, has said that Trump has "no soul" and "no conscience," that "he's willing to say any thing, to lie, deceive, distort and not feel the slightest bit of guilt about it," because he is a "sociopath."  I have taken Schwartz's position in arguing that Trump shows the chimpanzee personality of a grandiose narcissistic psychopath who has neither moral nor intellectual virtues (here, and here).

So what evidence does Klingenstein have for the Lincolnian depths of Trump's soul that people like Schwartz and I have ignored?  It's hard to say, because Klingenstein admits that Trump "does not formulate" the Lincolnian ideas that Klingenstein attributes to him, that Trump shows "inability to develop coherent arguments," and that he is not "someone who can articulate the nature of the war we are in, who speaks the language of justice, and who can remind us that our goal is the good."

In fact, as far as I know, Trump has never in his entire life ever accurately quoted Lincoln or the Declaration of Independence.  On February 12, 2017, Trump did wish a happy birthday to Lincoln on Instagram, and then he quoted his favorite remark from Lincoln: "And in the end, it's not the years in your life that count.  It's the life in your years."  The only problem here is that Lincoln never said this.  Trump felt no guilt in falsely attributing this to Lincoln.

Trump's Lincolnian soul is expressed not in his speech, Klingenstein argues, but in the policies he recommends--and particularly in his attempts to restrict immigration.  So, for example, Trump was embracing a Lincolnian idea when he said that America should not allow immigration from "shitholes" like Haiti, because he was expressing "the view that it is wrong to invite into our society people who cannot, or will not, live responsibly in the way Americans believe is the right way to live."

Trump's scorn for Haitians was an insult to people like Mia Love, the first Haitian American elected as a representative in Congress.  She was also the first black female Republican elected to Congress.  She is the daughter of Haitian immigrants who fled violence in Haiti.  She is a pro-life conservative Republican.  Is Klingenstein accurate in saying that she "cannot, or will not, live responsibly in the way Americans believe is the right way to live"?  Would Lincoln have said this?  Or would he have found it despicable?

Klingenstein is silent about what Lincoln said about the Know-Nothing Party, which promoted the anti-immigration xenophobia that Trump is reviving today.  In a letter to Joshua Speed in August 24, 1855, Lincoln wrote:

"I am not a Know-Nothing.  That is certain.  How could I be?  How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people?  Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid.  As a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.'  We now practically read it 'all men are created equal, except negroes.'  When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.'  When it comes to this, I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty--to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy."

As is pointed out in David Azerrad's response to Klingenstein's essay in CRB, Trump's Know-Nothing anti-immigration policies are rooted not in Lincoln's thought but in American Progressivism, because the American Progressives "believed in the superiority of the Teutonic races and their rightful title to rule not just America, but the world," and thus the Progressives would have agreed with Trump's scorn for the "shithole" countries.

The American Progressives were responsible for the Immigration Act of 1924 (the Johnson-Reed Act), which imposed strict quotas on immigration from Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America.  The Immigration Law of 1965 overturned these quotas to allow for freer immigration.  Trump's anti-immigration policy is an attempt to restore the 1924 policy of the American Progressives, and thus to overturn the Lockean liberal policy for general naturalization and open borders.  (I have written a post on John Locke's general immigration policy.)

This indicates that the Claremont Institute has now decided to drop its opposition to American Progressivism so that it can support Trump.  This suggests that if Trump has a soul, it's not Lincolnian but Progressive.