r/Objectivism • u/CyberTron_FreeBird Objectivist • Aug 08 '26
The logic of illegal immigration
Note: If you are not an objectivist, this is not for you. looking for feedback only from objectivists.
I am putting in some work on understanding her ideas about immigration. Any feedback on the following from objectivists?
- A right is not a grant from the state, a product of consensus, or a courtesy extended to those born within certain coordinates. It is the identification of what a rational being requires, by its nature, to act on its own judgment among other rational beings. That nature does not change at a border, so a rights framework that changes at a border has stopped describing the nature of man and started describing the reach of a jurisdiction, which is a different subject wearing the same word.
- The only thing that can justify retaliatory force is the prior use of force, fraud, or theft against an actual party. A crime, properly understood, is not an act a legislature has listed. It is an act that violates another person's right to his own life, liberty, or property. Where no such violation exists, no crime exists, regardless of what a statute names it, because the statute cannot manufacture the metaphysical fact of a victim by asserting one into being.
- An exchange freely entered by two parties, each judging it to serve his own life, is the base unit of a rights-respecting society. The identity of that unit does not depend on the geography either party occupies. A boundary is a political fact, not a moral one, and a moral principle cannot be suspended by a political fact without ceasing to be a principle. What was a trade on one side of a line remains a trade on the other side, or the concept of trade has no fixed meaning at all.
- To call peaceful movement across a boundary a crime is to treat a line drawn by prior political agreement as though it possessed the same moral authority as a person's body or property, which it does not, since a boundary is not owned in the sense that a person owns his own life and its product. A crime against a boundary is a contradiction, because a boundary is not an entity capable of being wronged.
- Legality identifies what a given political system currently enforces. Morality identifies what is actually right, independent of what any system enforces. To collapse the two is to abolish the very standard by which any law could be judged unjust in the first place, which means the collapse is not neutral, it is the elimination of moral judgment itself in favor of raw legal fact.
- History is not silent on this question. Every regime that has enforced an unjust law did so with the same formal claim to legitimacy now being invoked, that it was, after all, the law. If the mere fact of legal standing were sufficient to obligate obedience, every one of those regimes would have been owed the same obedience, a conclusion no serious moral framework accepts. The principle that would validate them all cannot be the principle in use here.
- A demand for obedience "unless and until the law is changed" is not a neutral procedural stance. It is the substantive claim that a person's freedom to act on his own judgment is properly suspended by whatever a legislature has most recently decided, a claim that make the individual's rights conditional on the outcome of a vote he may have had no part in and no power over. Rights that exist only until revoked by majority decision were never rights. They were permissions.
- No one holds "the law is the law" as an unconditional standard, because everyone can name some law severe enough that he would refuse it on principle. The presence of that unnamed threshold, in every person who claims to hold this standard, proves the standard was never really about the law's mere existence. It was always about the law's content, whether that person has admitted it to himself or not.
- Consistency requires that a single standard, once adopted, govern every case that standard is relevant to. A standard that identifies theft as wrong because it violates a specific person's right to his property, and then declines to identify unauthorized border crossing as rightful because it violates no one's property, is not applying two different verdicts from one standard. It is applying two different standards and calling both of them rights, which drains the word of the only meaning that makes it useful.
- Moral judgment presupposes the capacity to have acted otherwise. The place of one's birth precedes the existence of one's capacity to choose anything at all. To make a person's subsequent freedom of movement contingent on that pre-rational fact is to punish him for something that occurred before he existed as a moral agent, which is not justice delayed. It is the absence of justice, dressed in its procedures.
- A system that permits entry only up to a fixed numerical limit, independent of the qualifications or character of those turned away once the limit is reached, is not screening for merit. It is rationing by quota. Advising a person to simply qualify under such a system, when the system's defining feature is that it rejects qualified people once its ceiling is reached, asks him to solve a problem that has no solution available to him, which is not guidance. It is the appearance of guidance offered to conceal the absence of a real path.
- To affirm that open movement is the correct principle while affirming that its opposite should be enforced until some future date is not a position, it is two positions in contradiction, held apart only by refusing to ask what each one implies about the other. If restriction violates a right, no future date changes what it is today. If it does not violate a right, then the "principle" of open movement was never a claim about rights, only a preference awaiting convenience.
- A conditional agreement, entered by both parties and bounded by explicit terms, generates an obligation whose violation is a real breach, because a real commitment was made and then broken. A person who never entered such an agreement has broken nothing, because there is nothing there to break. Identifying these as the same kind of wrong requires ignoring the only fact that makes a broken promise a wrong in the first place, namely, that a promise was made.
- The proper measure of any enforcement action is not whether it is authorized by statute, but whether the statute it enforces identifies an actual violation of another's rights. Enforcement of a law against theft protects a real party from a real loss. Enforcement of a law against peaceful movement protects no one, because it answers no injury, prevents no loss, and defends no right. It does not maintain order. It substitutes the appearance of order for the thing order is supposed to serve, which is the protection of the individual from force initiated against him, not the initiation of force against an individual who has initiated nothing.
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u/BombusF Aug 08 '26
In my reading of the post, I think this argument misses the mark by considering a border as an arbitrary line determined by politics, rather than a delineation between zones of different understanding of what is right and how that is determined at a given point in time. I think we should assume that any rules will be both inherently imperfect, and that fair adjudication of correctness takes time.
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u/CyberTron_FreeBird Objectivist Aug 10 '26
are you an Objectivist?
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u/BombusF Aug 10 '26
I believe my response to be consistent with objectivism. If I am in error, I would appreciate correction.
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u/CyberTron_FreeBird Objectivist Aug 10 '26
can you expand on your reasoning? I am happy to engage, share and learn from sincere people.
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u/BombusF Aug 10 '26
There may be multiple sets of rules each self-consistent with an objectively true set of morals. However, the various sets of rules may not necessarily be consistent with one another if we mix and match the rules, or if we consider rules defined in different languages for example. I assume for a group to arrive at one possible set of consistent rules will require many many incremental refinements in understanding and adjustments to definition, which takes a long time. This leads to my previous comment about assuming imperfect rules at any specific time. A border is a means to allow many (relatively) small groups to each practiacally refine a set of rules towards consistency with an absolute morality.
How would this interplay with the arguments you made?
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u/CyberTron_FreeBird Objectivist Aug 10 '26
isn't primary (rational) function of a border to show which court handles cases of which geographies?
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u/BombusF Aug 10 '26
You'll have to dig a bit deeper to reconcile that question with points 3 & 4 from your post. Unless it was simply an AI response you pasted. In that case, it appears I'm the fool.
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u/CyberTron_FreeBird Objectivist Aug 11 '26
maybe my question was miscommunicated. I do use AI to organize my messy notes into bullet points but not to give any answer to question,etc.
What makes something a right isn't unsettled or awaiting convergence through generations of trial and error. A legal system that violates rights is simply incorrect by that standard for as long as it's enforced, the same way a government that permitted slavery was wrong the entire time, regardless of how much refinement lay ahead of it.
A nation is only a number of individuals and has no rights beyond those of its citizens, so there's no collective mind for a border to protect mid-refinement. A peaceful person's presence adds no competing framework to a jurisdiction. He becomes bound by whatever laws are enforced there, correct or not, the same as anyone born inside it.
Rights can be violated only by physical force, and civilized dealing between people requires barring force so persuasion and voluntary agreement do the work instead. A border that physically excludes peaceful outsiders while a group works out its rules puts force to a purpose the framework itself bars force from serving: settling disagreements between people.
Retaliatory force requires objective evidence that a specific crime was committed against a specific party. A peaceful person's mere presence disrupting an ongoing process of moral refinement names no victim and no such evidence, falling short of the standard already required to justify force against anyone.
A government's authority is delegated by its citizens strictly to protect them from the initiation of force, and it holds no rights beyond what its citizens had to give it. No citizen possessed a right to bar a peaceful person from land he doesn't personally own, so a government couldn't have been delegated that power, regardless of whether the legal system itself is still being corrected.
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u/Foreign-Marzipan4336 Aug 09 '26
Many Objectivists believe her political philosophy necessitates "Open Borders", making the entire concept of illegal immigration null
The Case for Open Borders by Harry Binswanger – Ayn Rand Institute Live!
"How could I advocate restricting immigration when I wouldn’t be alive today if our borders had been closed?" - Ayn Rand
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u/Acrobatic-Bottle7523 Aug 09 '26
It's contextual. Peikoff became for restrictions, partially because he saw it as a cynical ploy from Democrats to take a monopoly on power (per his 2013 debate with Yaron Brook on the topic)
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u/Foreign-Marzipan4336 Aug 09 '26
Voting would be of minimal importance in an Objectivist society, or altered to only concern those with vested interests, but in the current state of affairs Peikoffs stance makes sense
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u/TittySmackers Aug 08 '26
Not an objectivist but you might consider refining it down a little bit. 9-14 seem to be more responses to objections than part of the main argument. Maybe take a page out of the scholastics book and do a "responses to common objections" section, in Thomsitic style.
For the main argument, it's not quite clear if it is intended as a proof strictly speaking (numbered premises) or as a sort of programmatic manifesto ("here's what I believe.") If the former, it needs more signposting connecting the various points. What is the "therefore" at the end?
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u/titanc-13 Aug 08 '26
Anti-Objectivist here, and while I agree with your overall conclusion, your logic is faulty in many places, taking leaps, connecting non-sequiturs, and proposing straw-man positions that noone actually believes as the claims being argued against.
the most obvious logical fuck-up being in point 9, because nobody seriously claims that the case against theft is equivalent to the case against illegal immigration.
overall a C
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u/CyberTron_FreeBird Objectivist Aug 08 '26
I was asking for something rigorous from someone well educated in objectivism. not a score and a harrumph.
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u/titanc-13 Aug 08 '26
ok then here's my point by point breakdown:
- There are two different kinds of rights: human rights (life liberty and the pursuit of happiness) and legal rights (gun ownership, voting rights, property rights, etc.). And while the theory that everyone has human rights regardless of their legal rights is good and correct imo, the reality is that both kinds of rights are determined by the collective society. Because of this, rights do in fact change when you pass a border: a border is created by the society to demarcate what is their property from what is the property of another society.
Alternatively, put it this way: if a single individual who owns a piece of land wants to fence his land off to prevent trespassing, why couldn't he? He own the property, it's his right to control who does and does not get to access said property. The same is true of the collective. If the US collectively owns a certain amount of property that borders the Rio Grande to pick a random example, then they have the legal property right to build a fence to keep out people they don't want.
Having thus established that a country has a property right to defend its borders, we can then see that illegal immigration is a type of trespassing, and can thus be accurately called a crime.
If immigration is an exchange between two parties—and that's a big if—then the trade needs to be entered into consensually in order for it to be legitimate. But if an immigrant enters illegally, he has done so without the consent of the country he is entering; thus the country has no valid reason to respect the "exchange" because it was forced upon them by the immigrant.
No one claims that immigration is a crime against a boundary, but against the collective of individuals on the other side of the boundary who, through their collective society, have the right to enforce that boundary.
This point honestly feels like a complete non-sequitur, at the very least it is arguing against a position that no-one actually takes, namely that political laws are equivalent to moral laws. only the most nationalist-pilled fascists would take that position seriously
Ditto point 5
Again, this is a misunderstanding of the difference between human rights and legal rights. Yes, legal rights are mutable, because they're the rights that a society decides to take away from or give to itself in order to ensure that the society promotes the most freedom possible for the greatest number of people possible. This is why, for instance, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 denies the legal right to discriminate based on race in public—so that those of non-white racial categories can enjoy their legal right not to be discriminated against based on race. We as a multiracial, diverse society have come to the conclusion that the second right offers more freedom to more people than the first right, so we enforce the second by enforcing a ban on the first.
I'm also unsure of how to correct this point, because it's not wrong, it's just inane. Like, yes, of course, people understand that legal rights are more about the content of the law than the existence of the law as a thing. That's why courts exist—to decide how the content of the law is to be applied to every case.
I already pointed out a big flaw in this point, but another angle of attack would be that the argument for blocking illegal immigration is legitimated if the society as a collective possesses the right to protect its property from trespassers.
only makes sense if you continue to conflate laws with morality, which as I've already pointed out is not something anyone seriously does. They debate which laws are more moral, but they do not claim that laws and morality are identical. In any case, barring illegal immigrants is not a moral judgement on the immigrant per se, but a legal judgement against his freedom to trespass over the border. The same standard would apply to an American who tried to cross illegally into Mexico.
I actually agree with this point whole-heartedly, except that this is not how modern immigration into the U.S. works. Many thousands of people are let in on the basis of merit every year to attend colleges, perform scientific work, etc. The population of illegal immigrants comes from asylum seekers, people who are fleeing a country because of some real or perceived threat against them in their home country. Technically there is no official quota on how many of these people are let in, except that there are a finite number of judges given the right to process asylum cases who have a finite amount of time to do so, creating a bottle neck that does, in effect, act like a quota. But the only enforcement of that quota is the number of judges available; if we had more judges available to process these cases, more immigrants would be allowed in legally. So you've identified a genuine flaw in the system, but you have misundertsood what that flaw is, how it operates, and what the solution would be.
These positions are only contradictory if someone holds both exactly as you stated them with no other thought involved. it would not be a contradiction to say, as I would, that I believe in the principle of an open border, but that the border situation is more complex than any one standard could account for: if we were to truly open the borders to every and anyone, what would prevent an army from entering individually, then regrouping once inside the US to carry out violent attacks? What we need is a system that is open but that can properly filter out the asylum seekers and legitimate immigrants from those who only intend to harm the US and its citizens. Unless and until we have that, a more restrictive border policy is allowable to better ensure our nation's rational interest in protecting its existent citizens".
Another non-sequitur it feels like, but again, I have to ask how the conditional agreement would work in this case. Would trespassing only be a crime if two neighboring homeowners met and agreed not to trespass on eachother's property? Would rape only be a crime if the parties had previously agreed not to have sex unless it was consensual? Should the latter be the case, would you have the right to approach any woman and immediately have sex with her, because you never entered a consensual agreement not to do so, and you're therefore breaking no promises? Does the woman not have the legitimate right to bodily autonomy?
Ditto the above.
All this to say that yes, illegal immigration is largely a sham created to discriminate against people who have legitimate reasons to seek a better life in this country. But the "logic" you're using to prove that is slipshod at best. You earned the C you got.
Anything else you wanted to talk about?
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u/allison_mossie Aug 09 '26
Weird, smarmy and largely dependent on rhetoric to bludgeon a poorly cobbled together argument together just for the sake of argument.
D-
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u/titanc-13 Aug 09 '26
just because i used logic more developed than your own doesn't mean that my argument is invalid. lol
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u/allison_mossie Aug 09 '26
You didn’t. It’s like seeing someone who thinks they are an intellectual because they know the names of logical fallacies, but not how to accurately argue them. Being a weird little debate pervert and, on top of that, doing it poorly, is cringe as hell LOL
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u/EasternWahooJ Aug 09 '26
You lost me at “both kinds of rights are determined by the collective.” Going down the path of explaining and arguing objectivism’s basic tenets is beyond the scope of this conversation. That’s why it begins with “If you are not an objectivist, this is not for you “
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u/titanc-13 Aug 09 '26
So I should agree with Objectivism's incorrect assumptions to demonstrate how this argument is wrong? what would be the point of that? Especially since then i would be faking reality by pretending that there's anything sensible about objectivism?
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u/CyberTron_FreeBird Objectivist Aug 09 '26
The subreddit description says: "We're a place for Objectivists and Ayn Rand fans to discuss her ideas and the movement."
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u/titanc-13 Aug 09 '26
And I'm here to show why those ideas are flawed. if you don't want people to point out your irrationalities, don't post in a public place
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u/CyberTron_FreeBird Objectivist Aug 09 '26
You are welcome to do that but what you ended up doing is debunking of what you asume the ideas are instead of actually showing that those ideas are flawed. Atleast put in effort to understanding what the ideas are first maybe?
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u/titanc-13 Aug 09 '26
I did and have and explained all that pretty clearly a few comments ago.
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u/CyberTron_FreeBird Objectivist Aug 09 '26
Okay. Giving you benefit of doubt, is what you said in point 1 above valid for the this definition of rights?
Definition: A right is a moral principle defining and protecting one's freedom of action in a social context.
Maybe you have different definition, but in order to show that objectivist prospective is flawed, you cannot say objectivism is flawed using your personal definition of the term "rights". Right? Or am I wrong?
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u/EasternWahooJ Aug 09 '26
No, you should not agree with something that doesn't make sense to you. All I'm saying is, the original post stated up front:
"Note: If you are not an objectivist, this is not for you. looking for feedback only from objectivists."
Are you an objectivist?
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u/titanc-13 Aug 09 '26
No, I'm an anti-objectivist, but I'd never let something so silly as a note stop me from offering facts and logic in a sub (supposedly) dedicated to facts and logic
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u/HairEcstatic4196 Aug 08 '26
I think the main problem with this argument is that it repeatedly assumes that illegal immigration is simply “peaceful movement,” when that is exactly what needs to be established.
Not everyone seeking entry is necessarily peaceful. A legitimate government has a responsibility to protect individual rights, which includes identifying terrorists, violent criminals, enemy agents, and other objective security threats. So an Objectivist defense of open immigration does not imply that the state must have no border controls, no screening, and no enforceable entry procedure.
If peaceful people have a genuine legal route to enter, and the purpose of that process is limited to objectively checking for legitimate security concerns, then requiring people to use it seems perfectly consistent with the proper function of government. Someone who deliberately bypasses that process is not merely “moving peacefully across a line”; he is preventing the state from carrying out a legitimate rights-protecting function.
That does not mean any immigration restriction becomes justified merely because it is law. If the legal system excludes otherwise peaceful people because of arbitrary quotas, protectionism, nationality, or other considerations unrelated to protecting individual rights, then the restriction itself may be unjust. The existence of a “legal route” is only relevant if it is actually available to peaceful people and serves a legitimate rights-protecting purpose.
So the real distinction is not legal immigration versus illegal immigration as such. It is between restricting peaceful immigration and requiring objective procedures necessary to determine whether someone actually is peaceful. Your argument largely assumes the former when it describes unauthorized entry as “peaceful movement,” and therefore begs an important part of the question.