One reader asks, “[H]ow can a free or semi-free country with an open immigration policy protect itself from being taken over by alien anti-freedom ideologies?”
The answer is that a country’s government does not have to protect against ideologies, it only needs to protect against those who seek to violate individual rights. And that someone holds an anti-freedom ideology is not a violation of rights. As for the source of idelogies that are crippling America, it is the domestic anti-freedom ideologies (whether of the Chomsky’s on the Left or the Buchanan’s on the Right), and not the foreign anti-freedom ideologies, that are the problem. It is America’s own intellectuals who are destroying it. The big problem is that when immigrants come to the U.S. they learn from Americans that America is evil, racist, imperialist, a robber-barron, etc. from ‘European-Americans’ (and their various non-European prodigies) in U.S. schools, the media, etc. The ideologies are here already and their source is domestic.
As for unproductive immigrants being attracted to the welfare state, perhaps that is a good reason to dismantle a system that rewards moochers and parasites. After all, a parasite is a parasite, and it is irrelevant to your pocket-book whether that parasite who is imported or home grown. After all if someone murders your mother does it make you feel any better that the murderer was from your own home town? The corollarly of this principle is that a producer is a producer, and whether that producer is an immigrant or a citizen is irrelevant to the fact that you are able to obtain values by trading with them. A productive individual is always a benefit to the economy they are in. The key to the immigration problem is not to look at individuals as members of a collective, but to judge them as individuals, i.e., by their virtues–productivity, honesty, rationality, pride, etc. On such a standard you want to attract as many freedom-loving immigrants into America as possible, while creating an environment that does not reward moochers or looters thus enticing them to leave. The best way to do that is to shut down the welfare state, i.e., laissez-faire capitalism.