Resolved: That the United States federal government should significantly increase protection of privacy in the United States in one or more of the following areas:


Closed Borders

The Contemporary Assault on Freedom of Movement

by Alan Dowty

A Twentieth Century Fund Report; Yale University Press, 1987

[ Below are excerpts from Closed Borders by Alan Dowty. Dowty is professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame.]

From the back cover of this book: "Alan Dowty traces how different countries throughout history have dealt with movement in and out of their borders, explores why governments resort to restrictive measures, and describes the effects of these policies. Offering a wealth of tellin gstatistics, Dowty makes a strong case for open borders that would allow individuals to emigrate or immigrate at will."

Excerpts: Migration and progress (from Chap. 2: The Old Serfdom)

"Human history is the history of movement... " page 20.

"[T]he dominant historical interpretation [of migration] sees this encounter between peoples of different levels as 'the principal drive wheel of historic change.' Meeting strange and often threatening people sparks invention and imitation. Migration is the mechanism for cross-fertilization, the means by which ideas, techniques, and culture have been diffused and new advances stimulated." page 21-22.

Excerpts & Notes: The Liberal Interlude (from Chap. 2: The Old Serfdom)

The rights of emigration and immigration. p. 42.

John Locke's & the right of personal self-determination. p. 42.

The French Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man. p. 43.

The direct challenge to Mercantilism: Adam Smith and classical economists argue for free trade in goods and free movement of labor (people). p. 42-43.

Thomas Malthus published gloomy book on the problems of population growth. Fast population growth in Europe stimulated emigration to North and South America. p. 44.

"All these forces combined to push nineteenth-century Europe and the Americas close to the ideal of free international movement." p. 44.

"Restrictions on movement constituted one of the critical issues dividing the American colonists from George III. The Declaration of Independence accused the king of obstructing immigration to the colonies in order to limit their population" p. 44.

Thomas Jefferson (instructions to Virginia delegates to the 1774 Continental Congress) "[Nature] has given to all men [a right] of departing from the country in which chance, not choice, has placed them, [and] of going in quest of new habitations, and of there establishing new societies under such laws and regulation as, to them, shall seem most likely to promote public happiness." p. 47.

Excerpts: Rise of the Collectivist Ethic (from Chap. 3: The New Serfdom)

"After the relatively free movement of the nineteenth century, emigration and immigration in the twentieth have become restricted as never before. In a general assault on the right of personal self-determination, walls have been built to keep people in as well as out, making sanctuary for the oppressed hard to find. p. 55.

"As supporters of free trade argue that the flow of goods will regulate itself, so defenders of free movement contend that the unhindered flow of people will find a natural balance. In this view, the accumulation of millions of individual decisions will produce a better social result than any centralized scheme of control. The movement of people thus serves as a "thermostat" of the relative pressures and opportunities existing in different societies." p. 58

"A contrary school advocates regulating the flow of both goods and people, in the presumed interest of the whole society... The collectivism of the twentieth century is indeed rooted in the old organistic conception of the state, in which the individual is seen as only a cog in the whole" p. 58.

"Such ideologies may spring from either the left of the right; neither end of the political spectrum has a monopoly on collectivist zeal. What they do share is a determination to submerge the individual. Benito Mussolini proclaimed 'if the nineteenth century was a century of individualism…it may be expected that this will be the century of collectivism.'" p 59.

"At the opposite political pole, Nikita Khrushchev asserted: 'Each person must, like a bee in the hive, make his own contribution to increasing the material and spiritual wealth of society…'" p. 59

Excerpts: The World Wars and immigration (from Chap. 3: The New Serfdom)

"Effective control of international movement was one of the many legacies that World War I left to the modern world. Passports, which had been required by only a few countries, were reintroduced as a wartime measure and never disappeared. Now most countries required a valid passport not only to enter but also to leave." p. 62.

"What most frustrated the League [of Nations]'s efforts was the general crackdown on immigration." p. 89.

"[T]he real turning point came in 1921, when a tight national-origins quota system was enacted as a temporary measure. Total immigration was capped at about 350,000; immigration from each country in a given year was limited to 3 percent of all nationals from that country living in the United States as of 1910. One immediate effect was drastically to cut immigration from southern and eastern Europe" p. 90.

"Following the American lead, more than twenty states during this period adopted highly restrictive immigration laws" p. 90.

"In the long history of expulsion and flight, haven had always been available somewhere. Now, with the new stress on national belonging, many were in the unprecedented position of belonging nowhere." p. 91.

Excerpts: Immigration laws and the Holocast (from Chap. 3: The New Serfdom)

"I can only hope and expect that the other world, which had such deep sympathy for [the Jews], will at least be generous enough to convert this sympathy into practical aid. We, on our part, are ready to put all [the Jews] at the disposal of these countries, for all I care, even on luxury ships" Adoph Hitler, following the failed Evian Conference of 1938. (p. 92). In the original quote, Hitler used the term "these criminal" to refer to Jews, Gypsies and other peoples later exterminated by the Nazi government. The Holocast took place after it became clear that the United States &endash; the world's traditional haven for immigrants and refugees &endash; would not allow German and Central European Jews to come to America.

""If there is any country that believes it has not enough Jews, " Josef Goebbels declared, "I shall gladly turn over to it all our Jews." p. 94


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