If you oppose free immigration, you must logically also support mandatory birth control

Otherwise, you're a xenophobic bigot.

So the welfare state argument against free immigration (which I think Bryan tenatively endorsed below) goes like this: Free movement of people would be an unalloyed good, if we didn't pay people to loaf. Since we do pay people to loaf, we must limit the number of loafers and keep out those who are coming here to loaf. Loafers are typically poorly educated and low-skilled, so keep those people out and let skilled, educated immigrants in. Let's grant all that and see where it takes us.

A child's socioeconomic class is strongly predicted by that of his parents, and even those who become exceptions to this rule and go from rags to riches are drains on the welfare state as children. In fact, families with dependent children qualify for much more welfare than those without. Most of these children born to state-dependent families go on to become state-dependent adults, with more state-dependent children. If the expense of the welfare state concerns you enough to take away people's liberty to live where they like, then surely it must concern you enough to take away their liberty to have as many children as they like. If you're making a distinction between Americans and foreigners, you're a xenophobic bigot. Sorry, but them's the breaks. I expect all you closed-border libertarians to either don Klan robes or demand we adopt a one-child policy. Either way, I hereby evict you from the liberty movement, you statist, fascist pigs.

My co-blogger isn't a closed-border libertarian, so he doesn't face this choice, but I would like to address his point about the perils of social unrest. My personal belief is that dramatic social upheaval is going to happen. Things that can't go on tend to stop, and in my opinion putting off the day of reckoning is just going to make it worse when it arrives. I don't foresee that day coming in my lifetime, but then again I like to keep in mind that unimaginable, unexpected events are only unexpected and unimaginable until they happen. The Ancien Regime in France seemed eternal until it suddenly wasn't and the Romanovs looked to be on a path to modernity until suddenly they were on a train to Yekaterinburg. The way history is written and taught both events seem fated (now we start reading about the "foreshadowing" of the French Revolution as early as the Jacquerie and find the Reformation "prefigured" by the Lollards of the 14th Century), but they came like a bolt of lightning to contemporaries. Revolution in the United States will come upon us as a bolt of lightning too, but our descendents will shake their heads and cluck their tongues, wondering how we couldn't see it coming.

Since it's coming anyway, I'd rather it come sooner than later. The longer it is delayed, the more people will be utterly dependent on the state when it comes, and the more unimaginable Libertopia will become.