Mises’s Theory of Nations Applied to Immigration and Borders

In Nation, State, and Economy Ludwig von Mises defines a nation as a people group who all speak the same language, even while understanding that shared history, culture, and ancestry contribute to national identity. Mises also distinguishes between nation and state, arguing that a nation is a self-aware community, while a state rules over them.

His concept of a nation was based on his experience living within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In this case, language and nation did correlate more closely than in the US. Among other nations, Mises discusses how Germans, Italians, Slavs, and Czechs lived together under one state while having different, opposing interests.

In the US, multiple nations speaking English live together within the 50 states and under a federal umbrella. In our case, language doesn’t demarcate a nation very clearly. The external signs of American nations are accent, food, political philosophy, sports, religion, values, and music. In the US, these national borders aren’t on a map, but are understood when comparing North to South, urban to rural, and coastland to heartland.

In the same book, Mises states that immigration between nations improves economic efficiency. He also explains why that is the case. According to Mises, immigration occurs when one nation has a job surplus and another one has a job deficit like unemployment or very poor employment. In this situation, there is an economic benefit to both nations.

The law of migration and location makes it possible for us to form an exact concept of relative overpopulation…. A country is relatively overpopulated where, because of the large size of the population, work must go on under less favorable conditions of production than in other countries… With complete mobility of persons and goods, relatively overpopulated territories would give up their population surplus to other territories.

However, within Mises’s example the benefit is conditional. It presupposes that nation A has virtually no unemployment and full labor participation in the job market. I don’t know of a nation fitting that condition currently. Therefore, it isn’t certain that immigration will improve its economy. In fact, we can be certain that some of the unemployed in nation A will be hurt by immigration.

For example, if migrants from nation B are all schoolteachers, then the unemployed schoolteachers from nation A will be harmed. People from various skill levels from all over the world migrate today, but predominantly they have lower levels of skills and training. This means that the most economically insecure of the native people will be the most affected. Therefore, depending on the specifics, economic outcomes will vary.

Regardless, and more central to Mises’s theme, is that immigration creates the situation where multiple nations live within one state. Then, further immigration changes the size of one nation compared to another within one state’s borders. In a democratic system, each national population represents the relative political power that a nation can wield over the rest of a society. Mises explains,

Migrations thus bring members of some nations into the territories of other nations. That gives rise to particularly characteristic conflicts between peoples….

In polyglot territories, democracy seems like oppression to the minority. Where only the choice is open either oneself to suppress or to be suppressed, one easily decides for the former. Liberal nationalism gives way to militant antidemocratic imperialism.

When discussing nations, Mises assumes that each one has a different set of interests. We can assume that too for the sake of simplicity and argument. Another thing that Mises assumes is that political minorities will suffer mistreatment at the hands of the majority. Or at least minorities will get fewer of their desired political outcomes. One exception to this rule is the ruling class, which is a very small minority that works within the state on its own behalf and in rejection of the interests of the majority.

As government regulates more aspects of life and exerts more control over those aspects, political minority nations feel the squeeze more and more. Minority nations will try to add to their numbers to tip the scale of political decisions. Minority nations could also subvert the democratic system in order to take control by force. Native majorities would then react by voting for authoritarian measures to maintain their political power. Mises gives several examples showing that eventually one group will employ force either to take power away from the native population or to assimilate immigrants into the native culture. The worst-case scenario would be a destructive civil war.

It may be that the immigrants come in such masses or possess such superiority through their physical, moral, or intellectual constitution that they either entirely displace the original inhabitants,… Things are different if immigration takes place into a country whose inhabitants, because of their numbers and their cultural and political organization, are superior to the immigrants. Then it is the immigrants who sooner or later must take on the nationality of the majority.

…while the English emigrants could maintain their mother tongue and national culture, home customs, and usages of their fathers in their new homes, the other European emigrants overseas gradually ceased to be Dutchmen, Swedes, Norwegians, etc…. People saw that this alienation was unavoidable.

Managing a small amount of immigration for the purpose of improving the economy could still be attractive. But to avoid one nation oppressing the other one, it must occur within a laissez-faire government. There must be a high level of individual freedom and a mechanism for oppressed minorities to secede. Without that, a nation-state will share Mises’s experiences before and after World War I, an authoritarian regime holding together a fractured society.

Of course, the struggle of nationalities over the state and government cannot disappear completely from polyglot territories. But it will lose sharpness to the extent that the functions of the state are restricted and the freedom of the individual is extended. Whoever wishes peace among peoples must fight statism.

Mises’s ultimate solution in this book is for an oppressed nation within a state to secede and form a uni-national state.

The dissolution of the multinational state gets rid of many superfluous complications because it separates territories from each other that are compactly Nation and State inhabited by the members of one people. The dissolution of Austria solves the national question for the interior of Bohemia, for Western Galicia, and for the greater part of Carniola.

Once a nation breaks off and creates a new state, immigration once again becomes a threat to equilibrium. As a result, Mises proposes that secession could be a solution. It could be desirable though there is a question whether it is practical. Individuals still must cooperate if they want to enjoy the benefits of civilization.

In the absence of a state, individuals could still find it advantageous to form organizations to hire private security for protection. Therefore, the logic applies both to today’s world and a potential stateless world. Group membership rules are necessary to determine how to add new members and how to remove members who violate the rules. Keep that in mind while reading the last two Mises quotes,

In polyglot territories the application of the majority principle leads not to the freedom of all but to the rule of the majority over the minority. The situation is made no better by the fact that the majority, in inner recognition of its injustice, shows itself anxious to assimilate the minorities nationally by compulsion….

Things are no different in those territories to which the stream of immigration is directed today. There the problem of mixed languages arises ever anew, there imperialistic nationalism must also arise ever anew. Thus we see efforts growing in America and in Australia for limitation of…immigration…out of the fear of being outnumbered by foreigners in one’s own country at the same time that the fear arose that the immigrants of foreign national origin could no longer be fully assimilated.

For the reasons presented above, Mises taught that nations can legitimately draw new political borders for the purpose of protecting their interests. Using the same logic, and included in the same act, it is also legitimate for the new nation-state or new stateless-voluntary society to maintain its borders in order to protect its interests. Said in another way, if a nation has a right to secede, then as a corollary it has the right to enforce its new borders. Otherwise, there is no reason to secede in the first place.