Walter Williams asks (CHT LRC):
There are close to 7 billion people on our planet. I’d like to know how the libertarians answer this question: Does each individual on the planet have a natural or God-given right to live in the U.S.? … I believe most people, even my open-borders libertarian friends, would not say that everyone on the planet had a right to live in the U.S.
Well, that’s an easy one: yes, of course each individual on the planet has the right to live anywhere she chooses, so long as she violates no one’s rights.
All human beings are equal; being a u.s. citizen does not magically confer special rights on some human beings that are not enjoyed by others. Thus immigrants, as human beings, have every right to buy or lease naturally owned property wherever they find a willing transactor, and likewise a right to homestead naturally unowned property (which describes most of the land in the u.s.). Or has Williams decided to reject the concept of property rights?
Williams goes on to say:
What those conditions [for immigration] should be is one thing and whether a person has a right to ignore them is another.
Nope. Those are not two separate questions. If a “law” is unjust, then of course anyone has a right to ignore it. In the words of Martin Luther King Jr.:
One may well ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. … One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.” … An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. … Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.
Williams himself has written elsewhere:
I have a right to travel freely. That right imposes no obligation upon another except that of non-interference.
If Williams means what he says, then he has just acknowledged his own right to cross the borders of other “nations.” How, then, can he deny the right of other people to cross the borders of the “nation” in which he lives?
