In the 2024 presidential election, I believe that the Libertarian Party had the greatest opportunity for a major vote turnout in its history — one exceeding, I hold, at least 10 percent of the total vote. That opportunity presented itself with immigration, one of the burning domestic issues of our time. The L.P. presidential candidate had the opportunity to stand squarely against the Republican-Democratic status quo and present voters with the genuine libertarian position of open borders. I contend that that position would have garnered the support of hundreds of thousands of people who have grown disenchanted with the decades-old border-control system — and the death, suffering, and police state that have come with it — and who are looking for a viable alternative.
Alas, it was not to be. Instead, the L.P. presidential candidate, Chase Oliver, took the immigration position that has become part of the standard message that has come to define the Libertarian Party and its presidential campaigns — a position favoring America’s statist system of immigration controls and the immigration police state that comes with it. Not surprisingly, this standard position on immigration was taken by every single candidate for the 2024 L.P. presidential nomination, except one (me).
Far from achieving a major vote breakout, Oliver received only .4 percent of the vote.
The good news in this result, however, is that the standard lament that one hears from L.P. members after each presidential race has no validity. That standard lament goes like this: “Woe is us, Jacob. We only received .4% of the vote. The American people have rejected libertarianism again. I just don’t get it. Everyone has a libertarian streak in him, Jacob. Woe is us.”
Why doesn’t that standard lament have any validity? Because by not voting for the 2024 L.P. presidential candidate, American voters were not rejecting libertarianism. Why is that? Because a system of government-controlled borders is not a genuine libertarian position. It is instead a statist position. A system of border controls violates the core principle of libertarianism, which is the non-aggression principle. The libertarian position on immigration is open borders, which is consistent with the non-aggression principle — that is, the free movements of goods, services, and people across borders; and no Border Patrol, no ICE, no DEA, no borders stations, and no border police state.
Voters are right to reject the L.P. message
As I stated at every L.P. convention I addressed during my run for the 2024 L.P. presidential nomination, I stand with the 99 percent of voters who reject what has become the defining message of the L.P. and its presidential candidates. I believe voters are right to reject that message. I reject it as fully and completely as they do. That’s because that message is not a libertarian message. Instead, it is a statist message that has been labeled as “libertarian.”
“But Jacob, our system of government-controlled borders has to be libertarian because most L.P. members believe in it and support it. If the vast majority of L.P. members favor border controls, doesn’t that automatically make it a libertarian position?”
No! Whether a position is libertarian or not does not turn on the number of Libertarians supporting it. Instead it turns on whether the position is consistent with the libertarian non-aggression principle, which is, again, the core principle of the libertarian philosophy. If a position is consistent what that principle, then it is libertarian. If it violates that principle, then it is anti-libertarian even if 99 percent of L.P. members support it and have labeled it “libertarian.”
Domestic open borders
Every day, hundreds of thousands of people cross the Potomac River on the American Legion Bridge as they travel from Maryland and enter Virginia, where I live. There is no border-control station on either side of the border. Nobody is being vetted. The entrants into my state could include murderers, rapists, burglars, robbers, terrorists, Muslims, communists, Russians, Cubans, the Taliban, ISIS, Iranians, illegal immigrants, drug dealers, sellers of goods and services, and even people who are coming to steal our jobs.
In crossing the border, none of them is violating the libertarian non-aggression principle. None of them is violating anyone’s rights. They might do bad things once they get here, but that’s another issue. In that case, they get prosecuted by the state of Virginia. But they don’t get stopped beforehand at the border.
That’s what open borders are all about. I would estimate that 99 percent of the American people are advocates of open borders domestically. That is, they favor the free movements of goods, services, and people across state lines. They don’t want the federal government or the state governments to keep them “safe” with domestic border controls and the police state that comes with border controls.
Consider the guy from Texas who recently crossed the border into Louisiana and killed those people in New Orleans. If Louisiana had had a border-control system that entailed vetting everyone who comes into the state, maybe that guy wouldn’t have been able to enter Louisiana and kill those people. But very few Americans would advocate such a system in order to be kept “safe.”
The problem is that most people who believe in our domestic open-border system are unable to apply its principles to international borders. In all likelihood, that’s because they have been born and raised under a border-control system with respect to international borders. Therefore, it is very difficult for them to conceive how open borders would bring the same harmony to the international border that open borders bring to state borders. My hunch is that if everyone had been born and raised under a domestic border-control system, they would be shocked over the idea of open borders between the states.
The L.P. breakdown on borders
I would estimate that 95 percent of L.P. members favor America’s system of border controls and the police state that comes with it — that is, the highway checkpoints; the warrantless searches of farms and ranches; the roving Border Patrol checkpoints; the criminalization of hiring, transporting, harboring, and caring for illegal immigrants; the placing of concertina wire in the Rio Grande; Trump’s Berlin Wall, along with the eminent domain of stealing of people’s land on which to build it; the boarding of Greyhound buses to check people’s papers; the separation of children from their parents; violent raids on American businesses; and other measures to enforce America’s system of immigration controls.
I would divide the L.P. sentiment on border controls into 3 categories:
The right-wing element that currently controls and dominates the party: an estimated 60 percent of L.P. members.
The “pragmatists”: an estimated 35 percent of L.P. members.
The principled libertarians: an estimated 5 percent of L.P. members.
The right-wingers are fierce advocates of border controls. That’s the biggest reason they are extreme, unwavering devotees and followers of President Trump. When it comes to immigration, they are on the same page as Trump and other ardent pro-border-control Republicans, such as Florida Governor Ron de Santis and Texas Governor Greg Abbott. One of the interesting aspects of the right-wingers is that some of them have convinced themselves that the Republican position favoring border controls — and the border police state that comes with it — is a “libertarian” position, although they never, not surprisingly, try to reconcile their police-state enforcement measures with the libertarian nonaggression principle.
The pragmatists are different. They know that open borders is the genuine libertarian position, but feel that they have to compromise that position in favor of a system of immigration controls in order to garner respectability and votes from Republicans, who have long been their target audience.
Thus, the outcome is the same. Even though the right-wingers loathe the pragmatists and vice-versa, their positions, including on immigration, ironically, are the same.
Chase Oliver’s “Ellis Island” border-control system
The 2024 L.P. presidential candidate, Chase Oliver, tried to straddle the fence with his position on immigration. Like the right-wingers and the pragmatists, he favors the continuation of America’s border-control system and the police state that comes with it, only he wants the system to “let in” more immigrants.
But of course, that’s the system that Republicans accused President Biden of supporting — one in which the border-control system and its police state remain intact but “lets in” more immigrants. The difference is that Oliver would “let in” more immigrants than Biden.
Of course, the operative word is “let.” When you hear the word “let,” you know that you’re no longer talking about freedom. You’re talking about official permission to exercise a natural, God-given right that precedes the existence of government.
Even though Oliver called his system an “Ellis Island open-border system,” it was the opposite of open borders, given that it continued the statist system of border controls and the border police state that comes with it. Moreover, it also continued the central-planning foundation of immigration controls, which relies on the federal government to centrally plan the number of immigrants, the types, their credentials, their language, the number from each country, and so forth.
In fact, the Ellis Island system was one of the very first immigration-control measures that the U.S. government adopted, after almost 100 years of open immigration. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that as statists begin gaining control over the immigration-control system, the range of people who were to be excluded gradually expanded — e.g., anarchists, communists, prostitutes, mentally impaired people, people who might go on welfare, Chinese, Jews, poor people, uneducated people, dark-skinned people, and so forth. It’s probably also worth mentioning that the Ellis Island government-control system entailed having a team of male inspectors requiring female immigrants to stand in a row and remove their blouses and bras so that the male inspectors could examine their breasts for heath reasons.
The wasted-vote syndrome
Throughout the 2024 presidential campaign, the right-wingers repeatedly made the claim that favoring government-controlled borders was the only way a L.P. presidential candidate could garner a large number of votes. That’s because, they said, most Republicans favored immigration controls.
But as I repeatedly pointed out, that was a ludicrous position because most Republicans were going to vote for Trump, not the L.P. presidential candidate. That’s because when it comes to immigration controls, Trump is the real enchilada. Why would any Republican waste his vote on a Libertarian? And the fact is that he would be wasting his vote! No question about it. That’s because Trump could win the election while the L.P. presidential candidate could not.
Thus, it’s no surprise that Oliver got only .4 percent of the vote with his “Ellis Island government-controlled border” system.
Rectenwald and .1 percent
But it’s worth pointing out that the L.P. right-wing candidate Michael Rectenwald undoubtedly would have done much worse — i.e., .1 percent. That’s because of Rectenwald’s strange amalgam of positions: He was a self-proclaimed “anarchist” who would abolish Congress and the Supreme Court but keep the presidency intact, along with the Pentagon and the vast, permanent military establishment to enforce the border. He vowed to continue the Social Security program for at least another 30 years as a “gradual” “off ramp.” He favored the completion of Trump’s Wall along the border (which depends on eminent domain stealing of people’s land), the deportation of the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in the U.S., and the fierce police-state enforcement of America’s immigration-control system. I think I should also mention that Rectenwald is among the estimated 1 percent of Americans who oppose America’s domestic open-border system and would like to see a domestic border-control system, where each state would have the authority to “protect” its borders with border controls and a border police state to enforce it (e.g., walls around the state, state border patrol, border stations vetting entrants into the state, etc.). One can only imagine the endless traffic jams on the Maryland-Virginia border under Rectenwald’s domestic border-control plan.
Once someone in the mainstream media had reported Rectenwald’s unusual positions, he would have been toast in the eyes of American voters. There is no realistic way he would have garnered more than .1 percent of the votes given those positions. The worst part is that he would have been telling people that his strange positions were “libertarian.” Moreover, given their fierce loyalty to Trump, I’m convinced that immediately after the national nominating convention, L.P. right-wingers would have gone for Trump over Rectenwald and Russell.
That’s assuming, of course, that he and his right-wing running mate Clint Russell would have stayed in the race. As I have indicated in previous Substack articles, in my opinion it is highly likely that Rectenwald and Russell would have dropped out of the race sometime before the election and thrown their support to Trump, just as many L.P right-wingers, including some in the party hierarchy, ended up doing.
Squandering the opportunity of a lifetime
The shame is that the Libertarian Party had the opportunity of a lifetime in the 2024 presidential race to show Americans that there is a viable alternative to the Republican-Democratic statist system of immigration controls and the immigration police state that comes with it. I hold that that position might well have achieved a major breakout of, say, 10 percent by attracting votes from hundreds of thousands of people who are sick and tired of the chaos along the border but who simply do not know that there is a viable alternative. The L.P. had nothing to lose by embracing its decades-long position in favoring open borders and everything to gain.
In the final analysis, everyone one, including Libertarians and libertarians, must ask himself a critically important question: Do you want to be free or not? If the answer is no, so be it. But if the answer is yes, then its absolutely necessary to dismantle, not reform, America’s statist border-control system and the border police state under which we live. It’s up to Libertarians and libertarians to lead the way.