Conservatives who claim to defend individual liberty should favor free immigration.

Restrictions on immigration are big government intrusions on the rights of people to move, live and work where they please.

If conservatives really believe in small government, they should not favor border walls or patrols, workplace raids or deportations. In fact, they should call for the elimination of all restrictions on immigration.

Conservatism in the United States is really an amalgam of two different points of view.

Economic conservatives have used free market rhetoric mainly to justify pro-business policies, attacking organized labor, opposing social-welfare programs and undermining government regulation of business. Social conservatives, meanwhile, yearn for an imagined past of “traditional values” and ethnic and cultural homogeneity.

The two groups, however, are not completely distinct, and both make heavy use of the rhetoric of individual liberty.

Overall, the ideology of free markets has been a terrible guide to economic policy over the last thirty years. It has left us with a tattered social safety net, a gravely weakened labor movement and the reckless deregulation of industry and finance that helped detonate the Great Recession. Such policies have also facilitated income and wealth inequality unseen since the 1920s.

On immigration, however, it would be better if the free-market conservatives were truer to their professed principles. Free-market conservatives denounce restrictions on international trade as protectionism. They argue against restrictions on international investment. Why should the international movement of people be any different? Restrictions on living or working where one wants are among the greatest government intrusions against individual liberty.

Even cultural conservatives who pine for an early 19th-century style minimalist federal government should consider that the traditions of that time did not include restrictions on immigration.

“Before 1882, immigration to the United States was barely regulated at all,” notes Claire Lui of American Heritage magazine. "The concept of illegal immigration did not yet exist. Almost anyone who wanted to move to America was free to do so.”

In U.S. politics today, nobody would tolerate border patrols demanding proof that an individual from, say, Oregon had the right to cross into California. Were anyone to suggest such a thing, conservatives would surely raise hell about government “thugs” robbing us of our freedoms. Somehow, though, there is no hue and cry from conservatives when it comes to restrictions on people crossing from Mexico into California.

Instead, what we hear from conservatives are calls for more walls, barbed wire, surveillance cameras and armed troops — all to keep people from moving and living where they please.

So why don’t conservatives favor free immigration? Perhaps they do not really mind government power so much, as long as it is pointed at someone else.

Alejandro Reuss is an economist and historian and a frequent contributor to Dollars & Sense magazine. He can be reached at pmproj [at] progressive [dot] org.