Nation, Migration, and Trade: Essays on Mises and the Classical Economists

1. Mises on Nationalism, the Right to Self-Determination, and the Problem of Immigration1. IntroductionIn the current discussion about immigration, Ludwig von Mises is often invoked by libertarians as a staunch proponent of free trade in the broad sense that pertains to the free movement of goods, capital, and labor. Mises has even been proclaimed by some libertarians as an advocate of open borders. However, Mises’s views on the free migration of labor across existing political borders were carefully nuanced and informed by political considerations based on his first-hand knowledge of the deep and abiding conflicts between nationalities in the polyglot states of Central and Eastern Europe leading up to World War One and during the subsequent interwar period. Thus Mises did not evaluate immigration in terms of purely economic optima such as maximizing the productivity of human labor, irrespective of the political context. Rather, he assessed the effects of immigration from the viewpoint of the classical liberal regime of private property. My purpose in this short essay is to set forth Mises’s views on immigration as he developed them as an integral part of the classical liberal program he elaborated.2. Liberal NationalismFor Mises, liberalism first emerged and expressed itself in the nineteenth century as a political movement in the form of “peaceful nationalism.” Its two fundamental principles were freedom or, more concretely, “the right of self-determination of peoples” and national unity or the “nationality principle.” The two principles were indissolubly linked. The primary goal of the liberal nationalist movements (Italian, Polish, Greek, German, Serbian, etc.) was the liberation of their peoples from the despotic rule of kings and princes.