Ayn Rand’s views on immigration are well known. Back in 1973, in response to a question on “open immigration” during a Ford Hall Forum appearance, Rand stated:
You don’t know my conception of self-interest. No one has the right to pursue his self-interest by law or by force, which is what you’re suggesting. You want to forbid immigration on the grounds that it lowers your standard of living — which isn’t true, though if it were true, you’d still have no right to close the borders. You’re not entitled to any “self-interest” that injures others, especially when you can’t prove that open immigration affects your self-interest. You can’t claim that anything others may do — for example, simply through competition — is against your self-interest. But above all, aren’t you dropping a personal context? How could I advocate restricting immigration when I wouldn’t be alive today if our borders had been closed?
A little background on Rand’s ‘personal context’ —
On February 19, 1926, Ayn Rand arrived in the United States from the Soviet Union on a six-month visa to visit her Chicago relatives. She had every intention of remaining in the US permanently. But she knew that US immigration law was highly restrictive. She told officials that she fully intended to return to Russia to marry a man to whom she was engaged. This was a lie. However, given the restrictive immigration laws of the time, Rand’s entrance into the US would have been refused had she not lied about an imminent return to her native country.
In US history, when laws of prohibition have been instituted—restricting the production, transport, and sale of liquor in the 1920s or other drugs today—black markets arise necessarily, creating a culture of ‘lawlessness’ and dishonesty. It is no different when laws of prohibition are instituted to control the free movement of peoples. Like so many others who have sought refuge in this country from horrific conditions abroad, only to be faced with prohibitive restrictions at the border, Rand lied. It was her only means of escaping from the ‘airtight’ oppression that had engulfed Russian society.
Rand later recognized that dishonesty as such is “inherent in and created by the system” under which we live. In non-free societies, “no pursuit of any interests is possible to anyone; nothing is possible but gradual and general destruction.”
In her book, The Passion of Ayn Rand, Barbara Branden remarked that between the brothers O’Connor—Frank and Nick—there was a running joke about who would marry Ayn to save her from deportation. Rand stated, “Ours was a shotgun wedding—with Uncle Sam holding the shotgun.” Frank and Ayn were married on April 15, 1929. In June, they drove to Mexico and re-entered the US with Rand now the wife of a US citizen. Rand received her green card on June 29, 1929, but didn’t become a citizen until March 3, 1931 (see Jeff Britting’s book, Ayn Rand).
Today, fewer than 1% of people who wish to move permanently to the United States can do so legally. If today’s realities were operative in the 1926-1931 period of Ayn Rand’s life, the author could have been pulled randomly out of a car (or, perhaps, shot, if she were unlucky) and slammed to the ground by ICE agents, held in some detainment camp, and deported as having lied to get into this country or having overstayed her visa or having no green card or having no citizenship. And she would have been sent back to the Soviet Union to face yet another form of brutality.
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Postscript
In posting this to Facebook, I have encountered some who have argued that opening US borders would result in a massive migration into the United States of peoples from all over the world, leading to “national suicide”. I responded:
Rand was adding a personal context to her own views on immigration; that personal context was not her philosophical justification of it.
Regarding the larger issue, I think the main point is contained in Rand’s view that systems corrupt. There are broader reasons for why so many other countries have emigration issues rather than immigration issues. It is no coincidence that most of the countries with emigration issues are predominantly non-free societies (‘free’ vs. ‘nonfree’ is, of course, relative). It’s the same logic that led the Soviet Union to erect a wall across Berlin, to prevent those in the East from escaping to the West.
Moreover, conditions in other countries have deteriorated significantly due to sustained, reckless US intervention abroad, which Rand not only criticized but viewed as an extension into the international sphere of the same ‘aristocracy of pull’ that had infected the domestic sphere. From the Middle East and Southeast Asia to South America and Latin America, US foreign policy has created a cauldron of instability, nourishing mass migrations across borders. (And US intervention abroad is not the only factor at work; other governments are intervening violently in other countries as well.)
A genuinely radical approach to this would require not “national suicide” but global liberation.
Others have argued that the Refugee Act of 1980 created a legal asylum process that Rand would have benefited from had she come to the US today. But the Trump administration has put a halt to processing asylum applications, regardless of nationality. And given the punitive ways in which the administration has enforced those laws on the books, there is no telling how Rand—or anybody else—would be treated in the current context. Even more importantly, the immigration system has been rigged against those who are seeking to come into this country legally, making it nearly impossible. Given these constraints, I don’t believe that current immigration law is fair or just. And the draconian enforcement of current laws by ICE is immoral, in my view.
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I am often reminded that virtually every immigrant ethnic group has had to deal with bigotry of one sort or another. Indeed, my own Sicilian and Greek grandparents weren’t even considered “white” by the standards of American culture in the early twentieth century.
Italians experienced 50 documented lynchings in 9 states (from Louisiana to New York) between 1890 and 1921; Sicilians especially were singled out as criminals and Mafiosi, while others were excoriated as bomb-throwing anarchists. It took a generation for those 13 million Southern European immigrants (among them Italians, Greeks, Slavs, Hungarians, and so forth) to withstand a racial pecking order headed by White Anglo-Saxon Protestants.
Fear of the Other is a grand American tradition, which has always culminated in attacks on immigrants. Being a New Yorker through and through, I welcome immigrants to this country in a way that not even my grandparents were welcomed.
Notablog 