Of Scots, a French Nobleman and the Fortune 500: A Response to Ilya Somin’s Thoughts on the Views of David Boaz on Immigration.

   

In the 2006 article Ilya Somin mentions, which is reprinted in David Boaz’s 2008 work The Politics of Freedom, David recounts the 1747 arrival in America, from Scotland by way of Ireland, of one Thomas Boaz. This ancestor of Boaz - and any number of Boazs, Booses, Boozes, Boas, Boses, Boases, and Bowles now inhabiting America - was instantly a legal immigrant. Without the onerous and often Byzantine restrictions contemporary immigrants face, Thomas arrived in the Virginia Colonies simply an American. “Ah,” but the enterprising nativist might say, “but that was under the British Empire and the laws of colonial Virginia! It happened before America was America.”   That may be true, but the foundation of what became America came from the laws and norms practiced in the colonies, before America was America.

America has often benefitted from foreigners. One of the greatest contributors to the Revolutionary cause was the young Frenchman Gilbert de Motier, better known as the Marquis de Lafayette. Bored with his life as a member of the King’s Musketeers, and intrigued by the classical liberal ideas of the American rebels, the 19 year old nobleman heard that French officers were being sent to the colonies. He demanded to be among them; his request denied, he went anyway. He even went so far as to purchase his own ship for the princely sum of 112 thousand pounds upon being informed that the Continental Congress had no funds for his journey. Initially denied his own command due to his foreign birth, Lafayette made himself useful as an aide to George Washington, and when he was finally allowed into the field, he performed ably. His performance at Yorktown was crucial in forcing Charles Cornwallis’ surrender.

Even with all of Lafayette’s battlefield success, his greatest contribution came by way of his diplomacy; in 1779, he returned home to rally further support for the American cause. After a brief period of house arrest for disobeying a direct order of the King, he was allowed to begin making his case to Louis XVI under the guise of a hunting trip. Initially, he favored a direct invasion of Britain, but circumstances having caused that idea to be abandoned, he turned his attention towards convincing  his countrymen that the colonists had a reasonable chance of winning with increased support. He worked with Benjamin Franklin to secure additional monetary and military support before returning to the Revolutionary battlefields. That diplomacy was responsible for, among other things, 6,000 French soldiers under the command of the Comte de Rochambeau that also proved crucial in securing a victory at Yorktown.

While this is all a nice jaunt down a historical memory lane, the point of this recollection is to complement Ilya’s point regarding the disproportionate contributions immigrants make in scientific, entrepreneurial and medical innovations; before founding 46% of Fortune 500 companies that employ millions of native-born Americans, or winning 35% of Nobels awarded to scientists based in America, foreign nationals were key in helping America win independence in the first place.

So why the drift towards nativism? After all, many nativists give lip service to free trade, which includes the free movement across borders of human capital. A 2021 study in the journal Foreign Policy Analysis finds that the attitudes of most Americans towards trade is sociotropic in that their main concern isn’t aggregate effects, but how trade – which, again, includes immigration – impacts their immediate community. In communities wherein most individuals are highly educated/highly skilled, these individuals are likely to benefit from trade and are more receptive to it. Given the dearth of job opportunities for those who are considered low-skilled, communities populated by these individuals are, at least on the surface, negatively impacted by trade, and they tend to take a dim view of immigration.

As such, this causes many of those right of center who should be open to the aggregate benefits of trade to sublimate their lower-order economic beliefs to their higher-order concerns about protecting their in-group. In their view, free markets stop at the border, which acts as a detriment to us all. This is why David, and Ilya, and so many thinkers within the classical liberal sphere, have rejected the noxious compromise that some “libertarians” have made in holding that “blood and soil and God and nation still matter to people. Libertarians ignore this at the risk of irrelevance .” To paraphrase Boaz in Toward Liberty, immigration restrictions are a misguided exemplification of the protectionist impulse, as America’s vibrant markets attract the world’s most talented and ambitious newcomers. This is a source of strength, of growth and of progress for us all.