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Comment by Avtomatk | Hacker News Reader

Have the right to leave, but not the right to enter? It is the same as not having the right to leave if you cannot enter any place.

The analogy of the house does not fit very well (countries do not invite foreigners, they simply accept or reject their entry), it seems to me better to take it as a "party", at a party you are going to accept well-behaved guests and you are going to to turn away guests who misbehave.

The guest will pay the same taxes as the citizens, so the house is also paid by him.

Again, I did not find any arguments from the philosophy behind the current migration system

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Agreed, the analogy isn’t perfect but sufficient. I suppose one could extend Nozick’s arguments as justification for the current immigration system. Though I think doing so is a misreading, i.e., his position on the minimum state to protect the rights of individuals and that individuals should be to able to transact with anyone isn’t, at least in my view, a justification for mass immigration. Mass immigration is a collective action by governments not a transaction between individuals. Thus the government is larger than necessary and explicitly violating the rights of individual citizens.

>>Mass immigration is a collective action by governments not a transaction between individuals. Thus the government is larger than necessary and explicitly violating the rights of individual citizens.

This isn't good reasoning. Each immigrant still has own motives and his own thoughts. A large number doesn't render these individual immigrants as a part of collective formless blob or a de facto invading army.

Consider that not all immigrants leave their home countries because of their governments. Many leave because of religious/cultural persecution from one's local community (e.g. homosexuals) or unacknowledged rights (e.g. abortion) in an otherwise secular and ostensibly stable country.

I think you're misreading Nozick. Nozick would suggest open borders, extenuating circumstances notwithstanding. The argument for closed borders would imply that any authority over a country's or state's territorial holdings would belong to the nation's government rather than its people.

You’re looking at the situation from the immigrants perspective. Who is the individual in the host country initiating the transaction. Nozick, to my knowledge, never explicitly addresses the immigration issue in his writings. Most, such as yourself, would interpret him as pro-open borders, as most libertarian philosophers are. I would suggest that creates an unreconcilable conflict within libertarian philosophy.

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