AMirvish

Presumably, all of this applies equally to women's romantic choices. In that context, what conclusion follows from applying Francisco's principle to Rand's only two known romantic involvements (with her husband, Frank O'Connor and, adulterously, with Nathaniel Branden)? This is not meant as a cheap shot at Ms. Rand. Rather, it is offered as evidence that the issue of one's romantic and sexual choices is far more complicated than the speech rand gave to D'Anconia indicates and that one cannot in fact infer someone's entire philosophy of life from looking at their sexual partners.

As I've argued in similar threads, I oppose abortion both because I think the orthodox Objectivist theory of rights fails to provide a basis for making a convincing distinction between a newborn and a fetus (whether a person or not), and because I think that the actual versus potential aspect of the orthodox argument is likewise deficient. It's not my intention, however, to re-hash those arguments. Rather, I want to comment on what I consider the tone and hence the effectiveness of Diana's post and those like it. There is no doubt that religious groups are pushing for restrictions on abortion on theological grounds and that theological grounds are not a basis for an objective, rational argument. There is, likewise, no doubt that even if one opposes abortion on secular grounds (and there are those who do) aspects of what is being urged would affect things like in-vitro fertilization and things like contraception as mentioned in the post. That said, phrases like "products of conception", "perversion of right to life", "barbaric 'personhood' amendment" and such are extremely overwrought and introduce a subjective and emotional element into the debate that will convince no one not already convinced of the orthodox Objectivist position. The fact is that much of the country supports some form of the pro-choice position but most do not recognize or respect the unlimited (e.g. including late-term abortions) position that follows absolutely from the orthodox Objectivist position (and of course, from the utilitarian and amoral position taken by orthodox feminism). To the degree that there has been any change in the national view on this subject it is because medical technology has increasingly shown that the fertilized egg is not simply the undifferentiated mass of protoplasm that it was described at back when Roe v Wade was decided (Roe herself has reversed herself and now supports the pro-life position). On the constitutional front, even pro-choice adovcates have acknowledged serious flaws in the Supreme Court's ruling on the subject (e.g. virtually identical reasoning could have been used to proclaim the fetus a person and thus criminalize abortion). Principled, intelligent and moral people can be found on both sides of this issue. Reducing opponents of abortion to that of evangelical Christians (and particularly extreme examples of them at that) and proclaiming the beginning of the end of the wall of separation between church and state has no effect but to foreclose intelligent debate.

An adult, fully conscious human is capable of supporting his or her own life and so no one is obliged to support it. A child or newborn is entitled to support from those who created it. A fetus is automatically supported if its mother simply cares for herself properly during pregnancy: a positive action is required to end the pregnancy. So, yes, she - and the baby's father - would be compelled to provide it. What someone wants or wishes is not the determining characteristic in this or many other contexts. Whim worship or a desire to evade responsibility for the consequences of one's actions would be instances in which someone doesn't want to do something but may be required to do so given the context. This is akin to an emergency and I think a separate case. Being in a coma is not a natural or normal stage of human development and thus the basic nature of the requirements of a person's survival in this context are different. If the person is an adult, his pre-coma status means he is responsible for his life and if he had made no provision for this condition and no one else is freely willing to support him, then he can't demand others do so. If the person is a child, then the parents must make the decision for him. In both instances, though, this is different from actively interfering with an otherwise healthy, living organism. I think I've largely addressed this in my response to your comment regarding the person in a coma. You can't use a fact of reality to invalidate itself. Humans are conceived, gestate and born in a particular process, one they share with other mammals. The fact that a fetus requires its mother's body to develop whereas a newborn could be given up for adoption and thus raised by others doesn't, of itself determine whether or not it should be considered a human being. Neither does the mother's desire not to be pregnant. The mother's wishes, no matter how strong, do not determine whether the fetus is a human life. My argument is that rights arise from the requirements of human life at a particular stage in our development, with parents responsible for their children because they created them. Thus, the requirments of a fetus, newborn, infant et al impose an obligation on its parents. No one other than the parents is responsible for the consequences of the parents' actions - the parents being adults - and thus no one else is obliged to provide them with anything. The fact that medical care might be required, like food or shelter, doesn't change this. The parents, as adults, are obliged to produce these things to support themselves and their children and can't force someone else to do so. Hence, a doctor is not obliged to give care just because he may be the only one who can. A mother and father are, however, responsible for the life that they create. If they're unable to do this, they can ask someone for help, give up children for adoption, placement in foster homes etc., but they can't kill them. In my opinion, the difference here is that in a rape the child is imposed on the woman wholly against her will. It's presence reflects its father. She is, in effect, rewarding someone who brutalized her with a value, so that even if he is punished, he still gets something from his crime and thus profits by it. Moreover, she is compelled to re-live and remember the crime throughout the pregnancy. This does not seem like justice because there is still an imbalance remaining even after the rapist is punished. So, it is still killing a person, but within a different context and that context matters. That said, there are those who would argue that because the fetus is innnocent and a person, it would be wrong to kill it. What I hold is that a fetus is a human life at that stage in its development. Like a newborn, it is unable to sustain itself except through its mother. Since it was created partly through her actions, she has a responsibility for its (and so does its father) survival until such time as it can support itself. If she can't fully exercise that responsibility, she isn't obliged to keep it but she can't kill it. Carrying the fetus will not, ordinarily, place her actual life at risk. The fetus has no more right to life than anyone else, but the requirements of its life are, like those of a newborn or child or even an adolescent, different from those of a fully conscious, rational adult. More generally, the situation with respect to voluntary sex is different because of the adjective. Whatever else sex is or means in a particular context, it is also our method of reproduction. All actions have potential consequences. If someone did something criminal while drunk, they would not necessarily be excused of their crime just because they didn't want to do it or mean to do it. The fact that a drink can serve purposes other than slaking thirst and can be enjoyed doesn't change that fact. A woman has control over her body in her decision when, where and with whom to have sex. She can use birth control to avoid conception. But, her desire not to be pregnant doesn't change the metaphysical status of the fetus. As I mentioned earlier in this post, I see the "rape exception" as a matter of justice. In that context, compelling the woman to carry the baby inflicts an on-going or continuing injury to her for actions that she in no way consented to or had any control over. It also rewards her rapist with a child to whom he will have some connection and thus confers a value on him. That is unjust. Since the woman who is raped has taken no actions from which her condition results, whether the outcome is unintended or not is irrelevant: she has no responsibilities towards the child and thus she can kill it even though it is a human life. That's why I call it a case of self-defense. Just as she has the right to defend herself against the rapist, but also against an agent, if you will, of the rapist that continues to injure her. To me, this is a fundamentally different situation than that of pregnancy resulting from voluntary sex, in which a human life results as a consequence of her own volition. In both cases, the fetus is a human life, but in one case you can kill it as a matter of justice and in the other, you can't. So yes, I am concerned with the rights of both the woman and the fetus, and the context within which they exist. Please note that I'm not suggesting people should be "punished" for having sex. I think that sex, like all other activities, has potential consequences and that people whose relationship has reached the point where they're sexually active need to consciously consider all of them. Since sex has the potential to create a human life, it should not be engaged in irresponsibly. Since accidents happen, there should be no moral stigma to an unwanted pregnancy and the person could still give the child up for adoption. However, none of that is actually relevant to the metaphysical status of the fetus i.e. whether it is, objectively, a human life or not. Its moral and legal status follows from that.

How is a newborn a person? How is the potential or possibility of a newborn to reason or to develop a distinct personality somehow a valid criteria for distinguishing it from a fetus despite its total dependence on others but an invalid one for a fetus? To my mind, human embryo, fetus, newborn, infant, toddler, child, adolescent and adult are best described by the concept human being, with each specific term merely denoting a particular stage in their development. The Objectivist basis for rights is not necessarily applicable only to fully conscious adults, adolescents or children past a certain stage. What I think is overlooked is that rights arise from the requirements of our nature as human beings in a social setting. The nature of the requirements for our survival as human beings varies depending on the stage in our development. Newborns and children require care. By no measure are they capable of survival on their own or through their own efforts. Initially, everything about them that defines their identity and personality is merely "potential." In this context, recognizing their rights consists mostly, if not completly, of protecting the potential their life represents. Since rights can be violated only through force, this means protecting them against being injured or killed. Since newborns, infants and children lack the ability for fully rational thought and thus complete independence, they have fewer rights than adults. Working backwards, then, rights fall away until all that is left is that of the right to life, which is not just the right to a fully conscious, rational and self-actualized life - something impossible for newborns and even small children - but of the right to exist. I see no fundamental difference between the requirements of the life of a newborn (both metaphysically and politically) and that of a fetus. To my mind, abortion (except in cases of rape - where it is a form of self-defense - or the mother's life being at risk) is actually a violation of individual rights.

The context is important, agreed. The portability of the weapon is part of that. A person with a certain amount of explosive in Montana can certainly move it to downtown Manhattan far more easily and covertly than he could a tank. Certain types of weapons e.g. bioweapons, could be threats no matter where they are located. It is thus both the nature of the weapon and the physical context which matter, and this is the essence of defining a threat and prohibiting them. That is the correct conceptual approach. I think you're treating an abstract principle as a concrete and ignoring the full context. Rights exist within a social context and because we live in a society. The government's responsibility for protectng rights depends on certain conditions. There is a difference between my wanting to own a car or anything that in the ordinary course of action "might" cause harm or that could be misused and my wanting to own something that cannot be used for anything except to cause harm, and that will cause harm to innocent people, even if used properly. What is "reasonable" becomes the defining criteria within the context in how the abstract principle is applied.

If the purpose of owning weapons is primarily self-defense, then the weapons themselves must be capable of doing that. Area effects weapons (bombs, mines, poison gas - in the extremity nukes) and heavy military weapons cannot by their nature be used to defend oneself or one's property exclusively. Even if "aimed" at a criminal, their use would in invariably harm otherwise innocent people. The nature of the weapons themselves makes such effects unavoidable. All of that is without considering the question of why would any rational person wanting to protect himself want or need weapons that by definition can't be used to do just that? Consequently, I see no reason why ownership of such weapons can't be banned or regulated. In this instance, the right of an individual to own property is balanced by the nature of the particular type of "property" in question, itself and the context within which the right is asserted. The right of collectors to own non-functioning military vehicles and the like is not the same thing as owning fully active modern weaponry. There are a number of instances in which the law properly punishes people for actions that do not explicitly involve a violation of someone else's rights. Conspiracy to commit fraud or murder are recognized as crimes even though the conspiracy may not yet have come to fruition.

Let's say the arguments presented have convinced me of the economics of the matter, generally. The broader cultural and political arguments remain unaddressed and arguing that the historical record or practice is irrelevant because we once had horses instead of cars is a non sequitur. There is, no doubt, a considerable contribution to the whole illegal immigration issue and that of outsourcing due to government regulation, payroll taxes, restrictive labor laws and the like. No argument there. However, socialism and regulation are not the only factors at work here or abroad. Europe's current experience, some aspects of which I referred to in my original post, provides overwhelming evidence that people can come to a country as part of a nominally economic arrangement and cause massive political problems in their wake. Kosovo provides an example. Over the last 30 years, it went from being the "cradle of Serbia" into a Muslim-dominated state through immigration and high birthrates. Now, the more numerous locals have declared independence. The entire issue of how immigrants can change the politics of a country represents the context that is being dropped. And, it isn't just because the European states offer welfare. The London bombers all had jobs, were all native-born, were all middle-class, and they simply came to so despise the society in which they were raised (particularly its secular elements) one day they strapped on bombs, went down into the subways and climbed aboard buses and killed their fellow citizens. One example after another of this can be found as terrorist cells and plots are discovered. Economics does not trump culture. Holland, France, Britain and Germany have all learned this. They constitute a fully warranted "scare" story. La Raza and like organizations here are not at that stage...yet. But, they have their agendas too. The fact that those agendas are racist and irrational don't change their reality. I would suggest that the generally positive effects of immigration for our country has resulted from the willingness of people who came here to assimilate, the nature of the countries (and thus the cultures) from which they came, the fact that the countries from which most immigrants came were not right next door, the fact that immigrants did not come overwhelmingly from just one country, the greater cultural strength of our country at the time (i.e. greater agreement on the fundamentals of America's identity), the significant difference in technology that essentially forced people to leave their homelands behind permanently, and the fact that we periodically all but suspended immigration in order to let these other factors work so that the immigrants were assimilated, and not just the economics. Today, most of these factors do not apply. People can arrive here in enormous numbers easily and maintain strong connections to the cultures that they left behind. And, yet we argue that the logic of market economics will trump all of those things, most especially the cultural baggage of the immigrants themselves. If economics were enough, we'd never have had any form of socialism in our country at all. Rand herself made this point repeatedly. There is no basis for assuming that that observation isn't relevant to immigration. As an historical matter, there was a significant German presence here at the time of the Founding, so much so that some consideration was given to German being the national language. The Scots, likewise, were here in force from the beginning. To my knowledge, the Germans were never held to be anything except white and the Scots were not deemed to be a risk. There were also Jews and Catholics here since the 17th century, albeit in smaller numbers. The 19th century hostility to immigration based on ethnicity applied primarily to the Catholic Irish and Italians, to eastern Europeans generally, and to eastern European Jews. The assimilation of the groups whose nature most aroused the suspicion of native Americans at the time took effort by both the native and the immigrant community. Many fundamental aspects of the Irish and Italian Catholic tradition as practiced in Italy and Ireland had to change for the full integration of those groups into the American cultural tradition, which was largely Anglo-Protestant. Understanding how and why this process took place is wholly relevant to this issue. Paranoids have enemies. Not all immigrants bring desirable cultural baggage. The fact that nativist views are usually unwarranted doesn't mean that they always are. Claiming that if all immigration were legal everybody would enter through the proper channels and that we could shoot whomever didn't is, I would suggest, at best a half truth and decidedly silly, respectively. First, you can't argue individual rights as the basis for someone coming here and then shooting them on the spot if they don't come in where you want. Second, aren't processing controls of any sort a violation of rights? Would we check people before letting them write or speak or exercise their other rights? What then is the basis for any controls if it's a matter of rights? Either people can come here as a matter of right or they can't. As to criminals, the diseased and so forth, why not simply jail or quarantine them once they've actually committed a crime here or it becomes evident that they have diseases? Of course, such an approach would also allow actual invasion by stealth. It is, however, at least as practical as shooting them on the spot or wiping Iran off the map. Assuming that processing controls of some sort are acceptable and not violations of rights, how would they work? To perform background checks on people would require the cooperation of the governments from whom they are emigrating. In the 70's Castro let loose scores of his criminals whom then came into our country. I'm sure he would have said, "They're otherwise honest people who believe in your society" had he been asked because he wanted to cause trouble. One could expect similar "help" from the governments of China, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, amongst others. Even with complete honesty on the part of all concerned, it would be a lengthy process. So, we'd either require visas and controls through our embassies abroad (and quotas based on how many people could be dealt with i.e. what we have now) or holding pens/camps here until processing occured. This would require an enormous bureaucracy and would invite people to circumvent it. So, we'd be right back to where we are now. But, then, all of this would be a matter for legitimate political discussion, not a question of individual rights. It would be a political issue because how much money, manpower and resources anyone wanted to expend on legitimate processing would absolutely be within the scope of government's responsibility to protect individual rights. And, so we'd be having a political debate on the numbers of people we could allow into the country. If there was enough data to suggest that immigrants from some countries posed greater challenges to this process than others, we might want to debate whether we should devote our legitimate processing efforts to those from other countries. Then, we'd be back to controls, quotas...and immigration as a legitimate political subject and not a matter of individual rights. In addition to all of this, is the question of how things would play out given the current state of our culture and its political system. The fact is that we have a highly politically correct, heavily regulated, thoroughly politicized mixed economy. We have interest group politics and especially identity politics. We have a very strong religious element in our country and an extraordinarily nihlist and relativist but secular intellectual culture. Objectivism's profile and influence has grown over the years, but not to the extent that it trumps all of those other things. So, arguing for greater immigration as a matter of principle will cause even many people who might agree with much of what Objectivism says to once again see us as people whose ideas are not practical and whose outlook is wholly and narrowly theoretical. No converts will be made there. Meanwhile, the processes at work will continue with an ever more ethnically balkanized population, something that Rand herself did discuss in some of her essays. Good luck with all of that. You can't ignore the details of the process just because they're messy. Proper theory proceeds from a consideration of all factors and integrates all facts, not just some of them. I'll acknowledge the logic and weight of the economics argument, but I see no evidence for dismissing the political and cultural ones.

I agree that the free market does not say you can do anything you want and succeed. Becoming competitive in the labor market, as several posters have commented, however, is not as straightforward in reality as is stated due to the effects of time on economic activity. If all else remains equal, excess supply will drive prices down, as AceNZ noted. Competition in this sense is prevented because in an unlimited immigration environment, businesses can now alter the labor supply as it pleases. It thus creates a condition specifically intended to preclude competition for labor. This is very different from a condition in which a business improves its own processes. I also agree that a free market doesn't stop working just because there's an excess of labor. There is not a fixed number of jobs and, given time, the market will adjust. Historically, that has been the pattern with immigration. That is the normal case. And, in fact, historical immigration was based on the demand for more labor, not to replace existing labor. What is currently happening is different. In many cases, labor is being imported specifically to replace workers in certain jobs because employers want to pay less for those jobs or to force wages in those industries down. The people who are being displaced lose work and wages and all of the other things that would normally fuel economic growth. Immigration in e.g. the early 20th century was not like that. Similarly, when a company creates a new product that is in demand or a new industy is born, more work is usually created and thus those that lose their jobs find new work. If, however, one is simply replacing a current worker with a new, lower paid one, doing exactly the same job, the broader market simply supplies the new worker as it did the old one, without creating all of the spillover benefits that have been addressed. As an aside, firmly free market economists like Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams have been critical of unlimited immigration on precisely this basis, and one assumes that they understand economic principles clearly. Sowell is interesting in this regard because, like Bastiat, he looks at the full context. Responses to an excess of labor, such as re-training, starting a business, lowering one's wages and the like, all reasonable responses, assume a context that may not be applicable under the current circumstances. That's why immigration is such a hot button issue for so many people. It's one thing to say to someone that a better product or service came along, or that someone with better skills came along, or even (within certain contexts) that someone will work for less (as is the case in the unionized versus non-unionized labor debate), and that they must accept those things. It is another matter altogether to say to someone, drop your wages or we'll bring in so much new labor that you'll have to accept the lower rate or starve. I still can't see that as an example of a free market working effectively. It amounts to businesses having control over the supply of labor, something that has never been the case before. Under those circumstances, telling someone that they can choose not to work unless they accept the new, lowered wages is thus not really a free choice because the only thing driving the lower wages is the influx of more, equally skilled people, all the time, without interruption. And, that is exactly the situation that has currently developed, especially at the low end of the labor market. Now, I'll grant that some of the factors driving this are artificially high costs due to government regulation, payroll taxes and the like, but even if one took those out, a continuous flood of new workers would create the same problems. I agree that citizenship and immigration are different. My point was that the second generation automatically become citizens and do not necessarily assimilate. Even if one maintains the distinction between citizenship and immigration, a large enough body of unassimilated people can create trouble due to their numbers alone. My post gave several examples of this. It is important to remember the full context within which any principle is stated and to make sure that one has accounted for all of the factors involved. There is, no offense intended, a rather casual "after the Revolution all will be well" attitude about the positions taken in Mr. Biddle's argument and that of some of the posters. The degree to which the historical evidence is at odds with the theory suggests a moral-practical dichotomy that should not exist. I have no doubt that Mr. Biddle and the posters who support him do so from a genuine conviction about the moral issue here, but I am equally convinced that the full context of these concepts has not been considered or this dichotomy would not seem to exist. This is important because there are many things that can and should be said to Americans who are losing their jobs because they or the industries in which they work are genuinely uncompetitive, to properly explain their own responsibilities and the need to change. I'm not convinced, though, that Mr. Biddle's argument is amongst them. With respect to the full context of an individual rights-based argument, consider the example of the owner of a business that has developed national security-related technology. He would be wholly free to sell it to anyone in any other country even though this would increase our country to unnecessary risk (a case in point was Toshiba selling milling machinery to the Soviets that allowed them to make quieter submarines back in the mid-80s). Would the government be violating his rights if it forbid him to sell such a product? Based on the position taken on immigration, I'd have to conclude that most in our community would answer yes. I would answer no.

I'm not convinced that this is as simple a matter of individual rights as Mr. Biddle claims. The ability of any and all businesses (or any other individual) to bring as many people as they want into the country at will constitutes a form of attack on the freedom of people already there to sell their own labor in a competitive marketplace. The law of supply and demand says that under such conditions numbers will not just force wages down but effectively limit the ability of people to do anything about it. Since unlimited immigration would apply in all sectors and to all professions and to all levels of skill, the factors that make free markets competitive would not apply. Indeed, it would not be a free market if one part had no ability to actually bargain in a meaningful sense for no other reason than that numbers overwhelmed them. This is not the same situation as a particular company flooding a market with its own product, a product that it may produce more efficiently than anyone else or a company that operates so efficiently that no one can compete with it. In those cases, the ordinary risks of living and the fact that no one has a right to a job or a share of a market would apply. People would have alternatives. It is also different than a company taking its assets and going abroad. The situation with unlimited immigration is more analagous to the situation in a mixed economy in which political power is used to exclude people from markets in which they could otherwise compete, even though in this case it is numbers and not political power as such that is involved. Historically, periods of large scale immigration have been followed by periods of virtually no immigration. The intervals of low immigration have allowed for both assimiliation and for the economy to absorb the immigrants in a manner mutually beneficial to both the indigenous population and the immigrants. Continuous, unlimited immigration prevents both. More on that point momentarily. It is recognized that businesses may have perfectly legitimate needs to hire people from abroad and also that demand for labor may be real and well beyond what the country's indigenous labor force can supply. However, it must also be recognized that neither of those conditions requires unlimited immigration to be addressed. And, it must also be recognized that people wanting to force the price of labor down i.e. to create an uncompetitive market as described above can use open immigration to achieve just that. Therefore, the question of how much immigration a country has seems to me a question best decided in and through the political process and not as a matter of individual rights. The cultural and national security implications of open immigration are also real and I think Mr. Biddle has minimized both of them. First, the criteria for admitting immigrants (i.e. no diseases, criminal records and the like) would still allow millions of people to come here who could still present major national security challenges, particularly if they were brought in by other members of their own community none of whom might have actually broken any laws. The situation in the UK and in Europe more generally, in which people from Pakistan and India entered the country legally in the late 1960s is instructive. None of these people broke any laws. They filled an economic niche. They then proceeded to bring in their relatives and to otherwise maintain a connection with their homelands (and more importantly with the culture of their homelands) that enabled them to create economic, political and cultural enclaves within their parent society's borders, enclaves in which the parent culture's ability to enforce its (legitimate) laws is now frustrated by numbers and passive resistance. The situation is further complicated by the fact that the children of all of these immigrants are now citizens of the countries to which their parents immigrated and thus able to participate in the political process. In practice, this has created enormous difficulties in dealing with the threat posed by the ideologies, religion and culture of those communities. A somewhat similar process, albeit without the violence, is already happening here with groups like La Raza pushing an ethnic agenda aided by Hispanic communities large enough to resist assimilation. In the long run, the likelihood of a country whose politics, already interest and identity-group based to an unhealthy degree taking effective action against other countries when very large blocs of their own citizens claim kinship with those countries and their culture is low. And, that's what's happened everywhere that anything approaching open and unlimited immigration has taken place. In fact, there has never been a successful example of a country practicisng continuous, open and unlimited immigration, including our own. Second, a country is more than just the authority that has responsibility for protecting individual rights within a geographic territory. A country is defined by its culture i.e. by the sum total of the effects of the philosophy that defines it. The reason why the United States has developed as it has is because its culture was based on the values of the English and Scottish Enlightenment (and beyond that on Aristotlean ideas). Our country would have a radically different shape had its underlying values been anything else. One need only look at the nature of most of the other countries in the world to recognize that. This is important because people will bring their cultural values with them. If they do so in numbers large enough to sustain their culture, then we will have a very big problem. Historically, the American identity was strong enough to assimilate the values immigrants brought here. As noted previously, though, our ability to do that depended in a large part on being able to shut down immigration long enough to do just that. It also mattered that historically immigrants came from a variety of countries and from countries that were within the West (although not exclusively). It should also be self-evident that the effects of the entire population of Britain, Ireland, New Zealand and Australia arriving here tomorow would be quite different than those of a similar number of people arriving from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and China. Economics does not trump culture or philosophy, something that Objectivists of all people should recognize. Open, unlimited and continuous immigration will do more to prevent the development of an Objectivist society in the United States than just about anything else. For these reasons, the number, nature and rate at which immigrants enter a country is a legitimate political matter, subject to restriction as deemed necessary, and not open immigration is not an individual right.