I second Tyler’s excellent point, below. I once asked a very prominent “modern liberal” scholar, someone everyone reading this blog would likely have heard of, how he reconciled his support of a Social Democratic welfare state with general principles of liberalism holding that each individual has equal value, given that stringent immigration restrictions would inevitably be required to sustain the lowest echelon of society at the levels he had deemed (in print) necessary. Surely, I noted, he wouldn’t argue that U.S. taxpayers were obligated to raise all Mexicans’ standard of living to U.S. levels. He agreed, and initially argued that he also was against stringent immigration restrictions, lamely arguing that the affordability of massive levels of social welfare spending would not be affected by high levels of immigration. He eventually gave up on that one, acknowledging that ensuring that millions of new immigrants met his required standard of living for all Americans would be incredibly expensive. He then paused for a moment, and sheepishly said something to the effect that “maybe there is some kind of theory that we owe more of a duty to those already within our own political community.” I’m with Tyler on this one; borders are arbitrary, and a political theory that strongly prefers the well-being of someone in El Paso to someone in Ciudad Juarez who wants to move to El Paso may somehow be justifiable, but it isn’t liberal. I prefer the classical liberal tradition of (relatively) open borders and a (relatively) meager welfare state to a more closed Social Democratic system.
UPDATE: I’m now on a Passover blogging break, but be sure to check out Matthew Yglesias’s interesting response to Tyler and my comments. I think these comments show that within the broad liberal camp, excluding Socialists, Social Democrats, and radical libertarians, there is actually broad agreement on many issues, with the main area of disagreement how good government is at providing certain public goods relative to the market, and whether certain items should be considered public goods to begin with.
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