Associational freedom is immigration insurance

Imagine Amish enclaves and EHC zones, side by side

You want to live with your own kind. I want to bring in Brahmins to amplify American dynamism. What’s stopping us from achieving both our goals at the same time isn’t each other—it’s the Civil Rights Act and its consequences. When the dogma of ‘desegregation’ forces people with fundamentally different values into unhappy partnerships, immigration can feel like a life-or-death issue. It doesn’t have to be.

The futurist win-win solution to social conflict in a globalized world is already in the U.S. Constitution, the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and similar frameworks. It’s called freedom of association—a suppressed and overlooked ideal that simply says: let people choose their groups, and let groups choose their members. These groups can span from the intimate, like families, to the expressive, like unions.

Ordinary people’s intuitions are steadfast when it comes to intimate associations. If a black man solicits you for sex and you say ‘no,’ his persistence past your panties is called ‘rape,’ and you can press charges for a crime. But if the same man asks to rent a room in your house and you say ‘no,’ both the law and moral intuitions waver, leaving some unlucky landlords accused of an arbitrary crime called ‘racial discrimination.’

How did we lose this freedom to determine who shares our homes, workplaces, and social clubs? This shift arose from civil rights law designed to uplift ‘protected’ groups—chiefly African Americans. This evolved into informal racial quotas and automatic legal suspicion of differing outcomes between groups, fueling zero-sum conflict in society. Freedom of association offers a more flexible and sustainable way forward.

Buy, Sell, Sort, Thrive

Under the current regime of compelled association, bureaucrats decide how intimate a private group must be to warrant protection and whether its membership criteria are legitimate. In Roberts v. United States Jaycees (1984), the Supreme Court ruled that the Jaycees could not restrict their private organization’s membership criteria to young men, because sex was not ‘distinctive’ to the Jaycees’ charitable activities.

But in Boy Scouts of America v. Dale (2000), the Supreme Court held that the Boy Scouts could exclude a gay man from membership, ruling that antigay messaging was essential to the scouting organization’s mission. Yet 19 years later, the Boy Scouts rebranded on their own accord as the gender-neutral ‘Scouts BSA,’ raising questions about why the government was ever involved in defining the Scouts’ internal policy.

In the end, the BSA abandoned sex discrimination to counteract declining membership in a competitive market for youth organizations. Market pressures like these have long curbed unfair discrimination—even in the Jim Crow South! There, decades of state coercion were needed to break streetcar companies that resisted segregation laws for upsetting customers, cutting profits, and sparking boycotts.

It is not, in fact, ‘a piece of cake to bake a pretty cake’ if you are homophobic.

Boycotts weren’t the primary tool against the Christian bakers who refused to customize a cake for a gay wedding in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission (2018). Instead, civil rights law coerced Jack Phillips into a business relationship with the fiancés. The plaintiffs argued based on the stronger protections for freedom of religion, rather than the weaker ones for freedom of association.

Building Your Own Bubble

Carving out exceptions to anti-discrimination ordinances by appealing to religious freedom, as conservatives have done, reflects a strategy of retreat. Christian affiliation has long been declining among first-world peoples, and in areas like housing and employment, it is largely irrelevant. A sustainable answer to compelled association moves beyond special pleading and challenges the coercion in favor of a new ideal.

The natural home for a post-Civil-Rights vision for associational freedom is the western frontier of the United States, birthplace of Hollywood and the Silicon Valley ascendency. California, with no history of slavery and a population where the largest minorities are Hispanic and Asian, enjoys friendly race relations. Many communities form enclaves—a phenomenon only civil rights activists seem to find problematic.

These enclaves thrive because diverse groups have different preferences, like those on litter and noise. Steve Sailer, a ‘citizenist,’¹ frames dumping as an immigrant problem. But controlling litter through immigration policy is deeply unfocused. A better approach would let residents who care deeply—or don’t care—about visible trash sort themselves out. No state coercion needed. No racism or ‘citizenism’ required either.

California as America’s new north star reminds us that forced association was never the doing of cheery Chinese or Guatemalan newcomers, but always a black nationalist project. Sometimes nationalists lose, like in Milliken v. Bradley (1974), where SCOTUS struck down ‘forced busing,’ the practice of carting schoolchildren to far-off schools to fulfill arbitrary ‘integration’ quotas where no explicit discrimination had occurred.

Let a Million Laboratories Bloom

Louis Brandeis famously likened U.S. states to ‘laboratories of democracy,’ praising how ‘a single courageous State may… try novel social and economic experiments’ on a smaller scale, minimizing the downside risks to the larger whole. But for policies that must be set at the national level, like immigration, how can the country make a bold gambit for more Jensen Huangs while minimizing the discomfort of West Virginians?

The smart answer isn’t to cap our upside risk by closing the border. The ulcer gnawing at America’s gut didn’t fly here in 1965—it sailed ashore in 1619. Whether in markets or speech, the political question that separates the tyrant from the scientist is centralization versus decentralization. Those who demand forced association fear a world of voluntary cooperation, and we create this world with freedom of association.

Some of my countrymen find belonging wrapped in the warmth of their ethnic kin; others chase the stars by cooperating with anyone smart and curious. Wouldn’t it be better to save our energy and escape the endless cycle of vanquishing the other every election? If DEI is cooked, it’s time to put fresh dough in the oven and move the goalposts. Something smells good—it’s Associational Freedom rising for all.

1. Citizenism, according to Sailer, prioritizes ‘fellow American citizens rather than […] six billion foreigners.’ Yet this commitment to antiracism blinds citizenists to reality. I live in an ethnoburb of noncitizen Asians, where the streets are spotless. The only time I’ve lived amid trash-strewn sidewalks was in a hood dominated by ‘Foundational Black Americans.’