Jerry: No, I don’t have any regression analysis to back up my contention that, other things being equal, increasing density will lead to increased government. And Derb’s rejoinder about Hong Kong helpfully exposed the imprecision in my post. Of course there are densely populated places with less government than other less-dense places — Bangladesh vs. Finland, for example. But it’s not plausible to argue against the basic premise — as more people fill the same space, you will get more laws and more government. Think of an exurban community that sees the settlement of commuters from inner suburbs seeking cheaper housing — it will also see more traffic laws and stop lights and parking regulations (and people to enforce them), more zoning rules and building codes (and people to enforce them), more gun laws, more and higher local taxes, professional fire departments, human-rights commissions, dog licensing, etc., etc. Maybe these are all good things, helping to dispel the idiocy of rural life, but they also mean a lot more government.

And none of this has anything to do with Americans having kids — that’s none of the government’s business one way or the other. But immigration is a choice — even illegal immigration is the result of an affirmative decision not to enforce the law. And it’s elite-driven social engineering — explicitly so, as when pundits and business lobbyists complain than Americans are making the wrong child-bearing decisions which need to be corrected through mass immigration.

As for the rest of your post, you’re saying that it’s a moral imperative that any foreigner who can find a job must be allowed to move here. This is the kind of silliness that gives libertarianism a bad name. The free movement of people is different from the free movement of goods because people aren’t goods.

You further claim that the issue of immigrant welfare is not an issue because “C’s [the American taxpayer’s] transfers to B [the immigrant] are less than B’s tax payments to C.” This is simply false. Robert Rector at Heritage has estimated that the average family headed by a high-school dropout (immigrant or native) uses nearly $20,000 more in government services (federal, state, and local) than they pay in taxes. In a modern transfer state, how could it be otherwise? If I remember correctly, Robert calculated that you could balance the books only by eliminating Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and cut nationalwide public-school spending in half. Maybe that’s all a good idea — so call me when it happens, and then we’ll talk about immigration.

Finally, you argue that a guestworker program is feasible: “One can allow A [the employer] and B [the immigrant] to do business while maintaining rules for citizenship that might exclude B under certain circumstances.” Aside for the dubious morality of treating foreign workers solely as labor inputs, a la Saudi Arabia, the whole idea of “temporary” workers is a fantasy that has never worked in a democratic society. To mention only one problem: You’d have to abolish automatic citizenship at birth for the many, many children who would be born to the “temporary” workers for such a program to even begin to be possible. How likely do you think that is? And is Cato working toward that end? Because if the answer is no, then any support for “temporary” worker programs is at best incomplete, at worst dishonest.