The Guardian reports that thousands have recently taken the oath of American citizenship, and that many feel pride mingled with unease — one new citizen describing her situation plainly as 'survival.' That is a word I would not have expected at a naturalization ceremony, and it deserves to be taken seriously by anyone who cares about the institutional health of a commercial republic.

I have long held that the free movement of labor is among the most productive forces a nation can cultivate. In The Wealth of Nations I complained bitterly about the English Settlement Laws, which prevented workmen from moving freely between parishes, and observed that this restriction on the mobility of the poor did far more damage to the wages of labor than any combination of employers. The principle carries forward intact: when a person cannot move freely, or moves in fear, they cannot fully apply their faculties to the most productive employment available to them. The nation that employs them loses accordingly.

The new citizen described by The Guardian — Yesica McKeone, who raised her hand at her naturalization ceremony — represents exactly the kind of person a wise sovereign should welcome without ambiguity. She has already demonstrated, by the very act of migration, a degree of initiative and risk-tolerance that is the animating spirit of any commercial economy. Those who leave everything familiar in search of better prospects are, as a class, precisely the people a market society should least wish to intimidate.

Now, I do not argue for open borders without condition. A sovereign has obligations: to defend the commonwealth, to administer justice, to maintain the institutions that make honest exchange possible. Some scrutiny of those who enter is a legitimate function of government. But there is a wide distance between a sensible institutional gatekeeping and an atmosphere so hostile that lawful citizens describe their own status as mere survival. The latter is not a policy of security; it is a policy of contraction — and contraction, wherever it takes hold, is the enemy of the wealth of nations.

The deeper point is moral before it is economic. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments I argued that sympathy — the imaginative act of placing oneself in another's position — is the foundation of every civilized transaction, commercial or otherwise. A society that has ceased to imagine the position of the stranger at its gates has not only failed morally; it has impaired the very faculty by which it might reason its way to a fair and productive arrangement with that stranger. The two failures, moral and material, are not separate. They are the same failure seen from two angles.

The institutional question, then, is this: what framework allows a nation to distinguish, fairly and transparently, between those it admits and those it does not — without spreading a general climate of dread among those it has already admitted? That framework requires clear law, impartial adjudication, and public accountability for those who administer it. Where those conditions are absent, the gate becomes not a mechanism of order but an instrument of arbitrary power, which is the oldest enemy of commerce and liberty alike.