The weaponization of Milton Friedman

How conservatives grossly distorted the late libertarian economist's views to denounce immigration

Milton Friedman.
(Image credit: Illustrated | Robert Clay/Alamy Stock Photo, DickDuerrstein/iStock)

The late Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman was a free-market libertarian who believed that immigrants helped make America great. Yet he has become the restrictionist right's weapon of choice to expunge the GOP's pro-immigration faction. It's working. The Jack Kemp-style immigration champions are in complete retreat in the GOP, and the ultra-retrictionists are on the march.

How have restrictionists accomplished this feat? Partly by taking Friedman's vague and general observation that free immigration is not compatible with the welfare state out of context and repeating it like a mantra at every opportunity. Not an hour goes by without some restrictionist somewhere — on blogs, social media, online comments sections — invoking Friedman's comment to justify President Trump's aggressive border enforcement and push to slash immigration.

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Shikha Dalmia

Shikha Dalmia is a visiting fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University studying the rise of populist authoritarianism.  She is a Bloomberg View contributor and a columnist at the Washington Examiner, and she also writes regularly for The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and numerous other publications. She considers herself to be a progressive libertarian and an agnostic with Buddhist longings and a Sufi soul.