Kevin Carson is, without doubt, one of the most important writers in the mutualist tendency of the libertarian movement. His work on decentralised economics and critiques of corporate power make him a key voice in libertarian thought. Unlike many free-market advocates, he understands that markets, when distorted by state intervention, do not always function in the interests of liberty. His writing is far more original than the boilerplate libertarianism that serves as little more than an apologetic for corporate exploitation.

It is precisely because of his significance that his argument for open borders deserves a serious response. Carson is no intellectual lightweight, and his position is neither uninformed nor casually adopted. But, however well-meaning, his view of immigration as a fundamental right is based on an idealism that fails to account for the way mass migration operates in the real world.

Carson argues that the state’s role in controlling migration is an act of coercion that violates individual liberty. From a purely theoretical perspective, this makes sense—if the state has no right to tell a person where he can live, then surely it has no right to keep people out. But theory is not reality, and the reality of modern mass migration is not a spontaneous expression of individual liberty; it is a managed process, often orchestrated by the very state-corporate elites that Carson himself opposes.

What Carson fails to address is that immigration policy today is not about allowing individuals to move freely in a stateless world. It is about governments, NGOs, and multinational corporations using migration as a tool to weaken existing social structures, drive down wages, and create a permanent underclass that is dependent on state welfare and corporate employment. Far from an act of liberation, mass migration in its current form is a mechanism of control.

In Carson’s vision, an open-borders world would allow people to move freely, find work, and integrate into new societies as they see fit. The problem is that this is not how migration works under modern conditions. In almost every case, migrants arrive not as free individuals but as clients of the state, reliant on welfare, government support, and legal activism to secure their place in a new country. Far from escaping the state, they are ushered in by it—because mass migration serves the interests of those in power.

Take Britain, for example. The government actively subsidises migration, providing financial incentives to newcomers while ignoring the consequences for native workers and communities. The ruling class benefits twice over: first, by acquiring a new population that is easier to control, and second, by using immigration as an excuse to expand the power of the state in the name of “managing diversity.” Open borders do not create a stateless utopia; they create a justification for ever more government intervention.

Ironically, the whole matter of immigration can be seen as an example of what Carson himself calls “Formal vs. Substantive Statism.” In his essay Formal vs. Substantive Statism: A Matter of Context, he argues that some state actions, though appearing to be oppressive in a narrow sense, might actually mitigate greater forms of statism, resulting in less statism overall.

This is the case with immigration controls. On the surface, restricting movement looks like a statist imposition, an arbitrary exertion of government force. But in practice, open borders, far from reducing state power, require and justify an expansion of it. Mass migration creates the conditions for racial and religious conflict, welfare dependency, and crime—problems that the ruling class then uses as excuses to grow the surveillance state, impose new speech restrictions, and centralise political power.

Controls on immigration, then, may be a necessary mitigation of other, more invasive forms of statism. They act as a brake on the economic distortions created by state-subsidised migration, reduce the need for welfare expansion, and help prevent the social unrest that governments typically use as a pretext for censorship and repression. In other words, while border enforcement is technically an act of government, it may reduce the overall level of statism in society by removing the justifications for further state intervention.

If Carson’s goal is truly to limit the power of the state, he should reconsider his stand on migration. It is not border restrictions that create state tyranny—it is mass immigration that justifies it. The more diverse and fractured a society becomes, the more excuses the state has to impose hate speech laws, regulate employment practices, and police social relations.

It is worth asking: who benefits from a world without borders? Is it the ordinary worker, looking for stable employment and a secure community? Or is it the ruling elite, who thrive on social fragmentation and the destruction of traditional loyalties?

Kevin Carson is an exceptional thinker, and his critiques of state capitalism remain some of the best in modern libertarian writing. But when it comes to immigration, his position is not one of radical freedom—it is one that ultimately empowers the forces he seeks to oppose.