Review of Ebeling’s “Freedom Is Why Immigrants Come to America”

Review of Ebeling’s “Freedom Is Why Immigrants Come to America”

Thomas Allen

The following is a review of “Freedom Is Why Immigrants Come to America” by Richard M. Ebeling dated May 22, 2019, and posted by the American Institute of Economic Research. His article primarily covers immigration between 1840 and 1914. He claims that the immigrants of this era came, and even today come, to the United States because they wanted to live free or to escape troubles of Europe and to find a better life. (Today, only a few come from Europe.)
Unlike today, all the immigrants who came to the United States during this time were from Europe, i.e., they were White, with the exception of Chinese imported to work in the West and some Japanese. They were of the same race, White (Aryan), the same religion, Christian, and the same cultural background, Western Civilization, as Americans. (Not being White, Negroes were not true Americans; they had to be incorporated through the unconstitutionally ratified fourteenth amendment.) Now most immigrants are of alien races and cultures and often non-Christian. However, like the immigrants of old, the new immigrants come seeking a better life — usually in the form of welfare.
Also, unlike today, no welfare state existed to support them. They had to support themselves. (Ebeling  implies that today’s “immigrants,” most of whom are nonwhite, come for the same reason. Some do; they are mostly Whites. Most come to receive their rapine from stupid Whites through various welfare programs. Thus, like the immigrants of old, they also come to improve their lives. However, instead of coming to make their way with their labor like the immigrants of old, they come to improve their lives through handouts from the welfare state.)
Ebeling notes that before the early 1900s, European immigrants usually did not need a vista or a passport to enter the United States. (The inference is that today’s immigrants should not need a vista or passport to enter the United States.) In the 1880s, the first major restrictions were placed on immigration; they were placed on Chinese and Japanese, primarily for racial reasons. (His implication is that no restrictions should be placed on immigration. If they are, they are primarily racist.)
He argues that immigrants came to the United State because of individual freedom. That may have been true before the welfare state. Now, most come for their free handouts. Also, even then more probably came to improve their economic status than for freedom. That is certainly true today where most seem to come to improve their economic status by living off welfare. Then, they were expected to work to improve their status. Now, they are not.
According to Ebeling, classical liberal principles guided America. This may be somewhat true in the economic realm where the liberal principles of the free market prevailed — except for industries protected with protective tariffs. However, since the 1933 when Roosevelt brought fascism to the United States, socialism has been the guiding economic principle.
Unfortunately, in the social realm, liberal principles have come to dominate. The new morality of racial genocide, which is closely related to liberalism, which abhors racial distinction, has supplanted the old morality, which protects and preserves the races.
According to Ebeling, the lack of governmental interference in economic and social life drew people to the United States. This may have been true in the past. However, today, with the government’s attempt to manage the economy and especially social affairs with all sorts of Black privileges, that can hardly still be true.
Freedom can scarcely be what draws people to the United States today. The police state that Bush put in place has brought the United States down to the level of Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and Communist China, even though the worst of these tyrannies have yet to manifest themselves in the United States. (If the United States are the freest country today, that is a said commentary on the rest of the world.)
Interestingly, Ebeling accuses the South of political intervention in the economy via slavery. However, he ignores real political intervention in the economy like protective tariffs, subsides to businesses, contracts to political favorites for internal improvements, and fiat money. Generally, Southerners opposed most of these whereas Northerners promoted them. Moreover, New Englanders did not oppose slavery while they were amassing fortunes in the slave trade. Only after the importation of slaves became illegal did the Puritan Yankee began to become abolitionists.
Ebeling claims that, except in the South before 1860, only a “few instances of state-sponsored, state-endorsed or state-enforced discrimination and persecution of ethnic, racial or religious groups” existed. Apparently, Illinois prohibiting free Blacks from entering that State was not state-sponsored or state-enforced discrimination — likewise, with the Northern States that outlawed interracial marriages.  Moreover, the whole debate about prohibiting slavery in territories was to keep Blacks out of the territories and preserve them for Whites only. Furthermore, because of the few numbers of Blacks in the North, custom was usually sufficient to keep most Blacks “in their place” away from Whites. Later, these customs were often enforced by governmentally protected labor union monopolies and racial exclusionary clauses in deeds and contracts, which governmental courts enforced.
Ebeling notes that most immigrants who came to the United States avoided the South. He blames this avoidance on slavery before the War and the segregation laws of the South after the War. Moreover, according to him, politics were more separated from economics in the North and West than in the South.
He ignores several important factors in avoiding the South. For most immigrants, New York City was the port of entry. From here, traveling across Pennsylvania and the Midwest was easier than traveling to the South. Historically, people of New England and New York had moved across Pennsylvania and the Midwest and from there farther westward. Only a few migrated to the South. So, routes westward were better established than routes southward.
Another, and more important, was the presence of Blacks. Most Blacks resided in the South — as slaves and then as freedmen. Like most people, liberals and libertarians excepted, these European immigrants preferred living among their own kind. (How many liberals and libertarians practice what they preach and live in predominately Black neighborhoods?)
A third reason was that the North and Radical Republicans (descendants of the Puritan Yankees and radicals who fled to the United States after the failed Revolution of 1848) had destroyed the South economically with the War and Reconstruction. So thorough was the economic destruction of the South that almost a century was needed for it to recover. Even today, parts still have not recovered — Mississippi for example. Unless the immigrant was a scoundrel, a mountebank, or had political connections with the US government, he had little chance of acquiring a comfortable estate in the South. Too many impoverished Blacks and Whites lived in the South against whom he would have to compete. Moreover, they were too poor to be good customers if he were a merchant. Only in the North and the West, did he have much economic opportunity.
Based on his description of his ancestry, Ebeling is not a descendant of Puritan Yankees. However, he certainly displays their anti-Southerner biases and prejudices.
Ebeling closes his article by praising immigrants. According to him, they are far superior to native Americans. He ignores the hordes that come to the United States as colonists and who enjoy the free handouts that stupid Americans give them while they bring down the United States and forever end the hope of the libertarian paradise that Ebeling seeks. He gives many of the trite remarks that liberals and libertarians use to support open borders and unlimited immigration, so I will not repeat them other than he considers them more patriotic than most native Americans.
Also, he is a great proponent of the melting-pot principle. That principle is mixing the races together to form motley mongrel man, which is genocide and the end of not only racial diversity but all diversity.
For him, the biggest danger resulting from restricting immigration is turning from a free marketplace to a political planning of society based on an identity politics of race and gender and possibly class, and abandoning the “ideals of individual liberty, free enterprise, and voluntary association for human dignity, material betterment, and social harmony and peace.” Like neoconservatives, liberals, and most libertarians, Ebeling places no value on natural collectives like race. He preaches freedom, but it is not the freedom of the White man as a White man or the Black man as a Black man: It is the freedom of the Mulatto man.
Also, like neoconservatives, liberals, and nearly all libertarians, Ebeling is a disciple of the new morality. Unlike his despised antebellum Southerners and Southerners of the Jim Crow era and most nonwhites, who were and are followers of the old morality, today, most Whites and unfortunately most Southerners are followers of the new morality. Likewise, except for the Puritan Yankees and the radicals from Europe, nearly all Northerners and immigrants from Europe between 1840 and 1914 followed the old morality. Furthermore, like nearly everyone else in the United States today, he believes that the United States are a propositional country and not a genetic country. Thus, the United States are doomed to perish and with that all hope for Ebeling’s libertarian nirvana will die.

Copyright © 2019 by Thomas Coley Allen.

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