Ivo Vegter: Minority enclaves vs. free society

Key topics:

• Minority enclaves risk racism, exclusion, and impractical isolation

• True secession must be based on shared values, not ethnicity

• Immigration boosts economies and lowers crime, contrary to myths

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By Ivo Vegter*

Ethnic nationalists who wish to retreat to minority enclaves and oppose immigration are misinformed and rather delusional.

“What will it take for minorities to stand together and create a safe enclave?” asked a commenter on a recent Daily Friend article on Cape secession.

I always wonder how people who advocate for self-governing enclaves imagine they will achieve that. What would a “safe enclave” for “minorities” look like, and how will they remain (let’s not beat about the bush here) ethnically pure?

The model of Orania is not something one can easily franchise elsewhere. I suppose one could start new communities from the ground up on private farmland, and if our commenter would like to do that, with like-minded (and similarly hued) people, he’d be free to do so.

However, most of the country is occupied by a mixed, diverse population. Turning any part of it into a “minority” enclave would be pointless unless said minority was a majority within that enclave. That could only be achieved by preventing non-members from moving in, and perhaps even expelling non-members of that group.

How do proponents of minority enclaves think that their fantasy can become reality, without either violating other people’s rights, or worse, sparking actual civil war?

The elusive libertarian enclave

I wrote about the idea, popular among libertarians, of establishing enclaves free of oppressive big-government rule, where communities could be governed by minimal governments on classical liberal principles, in 2013. That article holds up well today.

Let’s suppose the Western Cape (or some slightly larger part of South Africa) secedes. The secessionists will swear high and low that this has nothing to do with demographics, and that they welcome people of all races. It wouldn’t do to sound too Verwoerdian about it.

That means they would distinguish the Cape of Good Hope (or whatever they call it) from the rest of the country on ideological grounds. Not only have a majority of the people of the Cape never voted for ANC government, but they haven’t voted for socialist government.

Their clear preference for DA government suggests that they prefer free-market capitalism to socialism, or, as the writer of the piece advocating secession describes it, “values of economic freedom, accountable governance, and social stability”.

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That is a perfectly legitimate basis to favour the establishment of a new country, in my opinion. I have expressed my in-principle support for the idea of Cape secession before (although, as I did then, I still doubt that it is even remotely feasible.)

Minority groups

What is not a legitimate basis for secession, however, is some parochial notion about membership of “minority groups”. That would group people together not based on what they believe and how they wish to be governed, but on the basis of racial, ethnic or cultural identity.

That is a collectivist way to view the world, and like all collectivist ideologies, it fundamentally conflicts with individual liberty.

If the newly seceded Cape was economically successful, it would become an even more attractive destination for people fleeing ANC misrule in the rest of the country than it is already. To keep its demographic character, it would need a strongly militarised border across 1,000km or more of desolate land to prevent an influx of economic migrants.

Creating minority enclaves is a pretty medieval way to arrange national borders, however. Nationalism has been the fuel of many a war, and many a genocide. Just because Europe has been at peace for a hot minute, doesn’t mean that its history of rival nationalities (and rival religions) didn’t lead to endless wars over the centuries.

Notably, Europe has been largely at peace in an era in which it introduced free movement across borders, first of goods, then of capital, and finally of people.

Free movement of people

I probably don’t need to convince classical liberals of the benefits of free trade and free capital flows (even though conservatives have gone mighty mercantilist and protectionist in recent years).

Let’s consider the free movement of people, then. If I, living in Tumbleweed Town, cannot find work, and wish to travel to Hustle City, in the hope of better employment prospects, can we agree that I should need no permission from any government, local or national?

If I choose to learn to make surfboards, and in pursuit of this business wish to relocate from Bloemfontein to Durban, can we agree that no government ought to stand in the way of my dreams?

If I, having lived for decades in Johannesburg, am sick of the crime, the traffic, and the intermittent water and lights, and choose to relocate my family to Cape Town, can we agree that no bureaucrat ought to stand in my way?

Then why should it be any different if I choose to move across a national border? I’m quite happy to submit to a background check for security reasons, but if I feel I can do better for myself (and therefore, be more productive to society) in another location, then why should anyone stop me?

Immigration and economic growth

Almost all the arguments against immigration are simply false.

Take the latest pronouncement by US vice dictator JD Vance, who wrote on X: “The thing that will bankrupt this country more than any other policy is flooding the country with illegal immigration and then giving those migrants generous benefits. The OBBB [One Big Beautiful Bill] fixes this problem. And therefore it must pass.”

This is not only false; it is the opposite of the truth. The OBBB will add $4 trillion to the national debt, while data from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) shows that immigrants, both legal and illegal, actually contribute to economic growth, and to the tax base.

To quote a line from the February 2024 CBO report that has been overtaken by Trump’s mass deportation tyranny: “CBO projects that the high rate of net immigration that began in 2022 will continue through 2026, adding an average of about 0.2 percentage points to the annual growth rate of real GDP during the 2024–2034 period.”

Here’s another, from the Penn Wharton Budget Model: “The available evidence suggests that immigration leads to more innovation, a better educated workforce, greater occupational specialisation, better matching of skills with jobs, and higher overall economic productivity. Immigration also has a net positive effect on combined federal, state, and local budgets.”

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And another, from the George W. Bush Institute: “Immigration fuels the economy. When immigrants enter the labor force, they increase the productive capacity of the economy and raise GDP. Their incomes rise, but so do those of natives.”

And from the Wilson Center: “New Government Study Finds Refugees and Asylees Contributed $123.8 Billion to the US Economy From 2005-2019”.

And it’s not just in America. Here’s the OECD: “In the 25 OECD countries with available data, on average during the 2006‑18 period, immigrants contributed more in taxes and contributions than governments spend on their social protection, health and education. The contributions of immigrants generally fully cover their share of congestible public goods, and contribute to the financing of pure public goods, such as defence and public debt charges.”

Immigrants and crime

But they’re criminals! No, they’re not. “The American Immigration Council compared crime data to demographic data from 1980 to 2022, the most recent data available. The data showed that as the immigrant share of the population grew, the crime rate declined. In 1980, immigrants made up 6.2 percent of the U.S. population, and the total crime rate was 5,900 crimes per 100,000 people. By 2022, the share of immigrants had more than doubled, to 13.9 percent, while the total crime rate had dropped by 60.4 percent, to 2,335 crimes per 100,000 people. Specifically, the violent crime rate fell by 34.5 percent and the property crime rate fell by 63.3 percent.”

Here’s the Migration Policy Institute: “Immigrants in the United States commit crimes at lower rates than the US-born population, notwithstanding the assertion by critics that immigration is linked to higher rates of criminal activity. This reality of reduced criminality, which holds across immigrant groups including unauthorized immigrants, has been demonstrated through research as well as findings for the one state in the United States – Texas – that tracks criminal arrests and convictions by immigration status.”

Even in welfare states, immigration creates more jobs than immigrants take, and immigration creates more economic growth and more tax revenue than the government services they consume.

Immigration has turned out to be a net benefit to an economy, everywhere its impact has been measured.

This means that opposition to immigration is exclusively due to misinformation, or to outright xenophobia and racism.

I believe in a society where all people have equal rights, by virtue of their membership of the human race. How a government treats someone should not depend upon where they happen to have been born. It should depend upon where they choose to live and try to be productive members of society.

Blocking immigration

So, we’re back to square one: how would you sustain a “minority” enclave, if you allowed immigration? And on what basis would you block immigration in order to maintain the “minority” character of your enclave?

You’d have to be openly racist about it, wouldn’t you, or you couldn’t maintain your majority in your parochial little enclave. You’d couch it in more delicate terms, of course, by saying that your enclave is for people who speak Afrikaans, or who go to church, but we’d all know what’s what.

It isn’t even possible to properly identify who the members of a minority ought to be, or why they would get on with each other in their own, isolated community enclave.

There are many Afrikaners who do not feel that the vocal nationalist activists speak for them, and who feel perfectly comfortable in a cosmopolitan, diverse, non-racial world.

Conversely, there are religious, nationalist Afrikaners who probably have more in common with fundamentalist Muslims than they do with secular liberals like me.

I’d be all for a secessionist movement that sold itself purely on the classically liberal constitution that it would carve in stone, establishing individual freedom, property rights, free markets and equality before the law as the highest ideals of the newly established country.

But that movement would have to welcome immigrants, as a matter of principle.

And that’s where you run into difficulties. If only it were possible to immunise such a movement from nationalists, racists, xenophobes, and other believers in the collectivist identity politics that they so resent in their political opponents.

Economically speaking, they’re simply wrong, and morally speaking, they occupy pretty low ground, too.

*Ivo Vegter is a freelance journalist, columnist and speaker who loves debunking myths and misconceptions, and addresses topics from the perspective of individual liberty and free markets.

This article was first published by Daily Friend and is republished with permission