ABSTRACT
Poor aliens could not afford to live in affluent suburbs (except in the servants' quarters), but that would be true of poor citizens too. Individual property owners could refuse to hire aliens, to rent them houses, to sell them food, and so on, but in a Nozickean world they could do the same things to their fellow citizens. In other words, individuals may do what they like with their own personal property. They may normally exclude whomever they want from land they own. But they have this right to exclude as individuals, not as members of a collective. They cannot prevent other individuals from acting differently (hiring aliens, renting them houses, etc.). 4
Is there any room for collective action to restrict entry in Nozick's theory? In the final section of his book, Nozick draws a distinction between nations (or states) and small face-to-face communities. People may voluntarily construct small communities on principles quite different from the ones that govern the state so long as individuals are free to leave these communities. For example, people may choose to pool their property and to make collective decisions on the basis of majority rule. Nozick argues that this sort of community has a right to restrict membership to those whom it wishes to admit and to control entry to its land. But such a community may also redistribute its jointly held property as it chooses. This is not an option that Nozick (or any other property rights theorist) intends to grant to the state. 5
This shows why the claim "It's our country. We can admit or exclude whomever we want" is ultimately incompatible with a property rights theory like Nozick's. Property cannot serve as a protection for individuals against the collective if property is collectively owned. If the notion of collective ownership is used to justify keeping aliens out, it opens the possibility of using the same notion to justify redistributing income or whatever else the majority decides. Nozick explicitly says that the land of a nation is not the collective property of its citizens. It follows that the control that the state can legitimately exercise over that land is limited to the enforcement of the rights of individual owners. Prohibiting people from entering a territory because they did not happen to be born there or otherwise gain the credentials of citizenship is no part of any state's legitimate mandate. The state has no right to restrict immigration.
